Well, it is almost time for the Multimedia Reporting class to draw to a close for this year. It has been an interesting, but difficult couple of months. Our class has taken part in 3 live rolling news days, and appear to have become more confident, better organised and less stressed.
On a personal level, trying to find new stories was easy enough however, trying to find a new angle for follow up stories was slightly harder. Having seen a news release regarding an attack in an underpass, and reading about previous attacks, I decided that I would cover the story from the angle of ‘how safe underpasses are’ for our second live rolling news day. I went to one where a particularly brutal attack took place last year and tried to get interviews with local people. That was very difficult to do. Most people were unwilling to talk to me due to time restraints and others that did speak, were unwilling to give their details. Undaunted, I travelled to another part of town where other attacks had taken place over the last few years, only to find that the underpasses in question where in the process of being renovated, cleaned up and painted. Once I returned home I decided to do some research on the situation and found that all the angles I had considered for my story had already been covered by Edinburgh Evening News. As a result I decided to take it no further. This turned out to be a mistake. Less than 2 weeks later, another attack took place resulting in someone being mugged and beaten. In retrospect, had I written my original story, I could have placed it to one side and amended it when the new attack took place, covering it with the additional angle that renovation did not necessarily improve safety. A valuable lesson was learned from that experience; to go with my instincts, do the story and keep it for future reference.
I ended up doing a story instead on National Adoption Week instead. I was lucky to find someone who was happy to be interviewed and gave me some fantastic quotes, which reinforced my story and gave it a personal angle. Ideally though, had I had the luxury of choice, I would have chosen to stay with the underpass story. It was grittier and more hard hitting, and to me, constituted a ‘hard news’ story.
The third living rolling news day was a revelation to me. I found my story the day before, left my son playing in the living room while I locked myself ready to carry out a plethora of research. It certainly paid off. I was able to gather the information I needed and get most of my story typed up in advance, ready for the following day. I had emailed a couple of contacts in the hope of gathering some addition information and statistics, and if I heard back from them in time, would simply add this to the original story.
Going in to class the following day I was surprised to find that most people were already there, and in the process of doing their stories. There was a busy, productive atmosphere, yet it was still calm. I had heard nothing back from my contacts so carried on with my story, making a couple of adjustments where required. I remembered this time to check the Guardian Style Guide, which had been laid out in preparation for everyone, added my tags, byline and picture and then saved my draft for the editor to check.
Because everyone was so well prepared this time, a number of stories were put in well before the deadline approached. This gave some of the class time to help others, look for additional stories and create a podcast. I was able to go upstairs to look at the live news feeds which could then be sent downstairs for additional stories. It was interesting to see how the process worked, and gave me an insight into how it must work in the newsroom environment.
After going back downstairs, things were running so smoothly that there was very little more that I could do. I went online however and checked for up to date press releases and found 2 that could be relevant. After that I typed the words “Lothian breaking news” into a search engine. From that I found a breaking news story. All 3 of the stories I found were included on our podcast.
Overall I have found Multimedia Reporting 2, to be an eye-opener. Instead of talking about news gathering, we were given the opportunity to actually be news gatherers. We worked well together as a team, learning how to improve each time, turning our rusty machine into a finely tuned instrument.
