Critical Reflection Year 3, Semester 1

Winchester News Online (WINOL) has grown from strength to strength each term and during my time working on WINOL I have seen this first hand. Our local-news and features based site is run by both second and third year Journalism students, each having their own personal role within the team. Throughout the past semester, we as a team have worked together to make WINOL a successful, professional and popular news site.

As a whole, I believe WINOL has become even more popular this term, with our website, features and weekly news bulletin coming together to do this. Circulation figures have improved throughout the term, being at it’s peak on the 8th December when we ranked #776,668 Globally and #27,807 in the UK on the 30th October. Unfortunately, these numbers have drastically slipped from last semester when we received a global rank of #373,953 and #12,025 in the UK. A main reason for this was due to the lack of news stories both on the bulletin and on the website. This term was slightly more difficult as this was the first time the second year students had participated in WINOL, making the first half of the term a learning curve. Once everyone got used to their new roles within the team, things starting to go smoother and the figures began to rise. Ultimately, after 4 months of nothing being updated on the site, it is inevitable that viewing figures would make a drastic decrease. 

This term I feel that the news team have done particularly well in adapting to their roles and improving on each of their packages in terms of scripting, filming and pictures. At the beginning of the semester, many of the packages had poor white balance, were over exposed and sometimes out of focus. However, this was due to inexperience and by the end of the term many of these issues were overcome. A main issue this term was the use of pictures and story telling. Packages need to be visually lead, and at the beginning of term, many of the packages didn’t use enough good pictures. Similarly to many other problems, these where rectified with time and practice, and by the end of the term packages were telling great stories with the use of pictures in a way that had the desired effect on the audience.

There has been a few particular news stories this term which have been a great success. The Elizabeth Stewart strike interview by Calum Warren-Piper received a lot of hits due to the way it was focussed on students and teachers which are some of our main target audiences. Another brilliant interview this term was by Nadine Forshaw, our Political editor, who did an exclusive interview with Rowenna Davis, Labour candidate for Southampton. This received a lot of hits as it was current and relevant to the local area. My personal favourite package of the term was done by Liam Garrahan on scrap metal. The reason for this was because I felt it had everything a good package should have. It included brilliant NAT SOT at the beginning, good piece to camera and the use of sequences. It is obvious that this package was planned before hand to make sure everything went well on the day and I believe it was one of the best packages of the term.

A major success for us as a team this term was winning a BJTC award for ‘best news day of the year‘ for our coverage of the budget, earlier on this year. This was a high point this term as a lot of work went in to this particular bulletin which was made by the third years and MA students from last term and the award was well deserved.

The features section of WINOL had a few rocky periods this term, with many of the magazines struggling to get off their feet. The reason for this was due to there being too many editors of specific magazines, and not enough actual writers, therefore content wasn’t being put up on the site regularly enough. By the end of the semester, this problem was overcome by merging all of the magazines into one named ‘Here and Now’. Next term, I believe the features will become even more popular as the new site allows audiences to find everything in one place and skip from one feature to another much easier than before. Absolute:ly magazine was the only magazine which maintained it’s content update. This was due to the new second year students updating the magazine weekly, including many good features and interviews with well-regarded industry people. In my opinion, a major triumph this term was Access Winchester, a what’s on guide. It was a weekly show which included a variety of packages from TV personality interviews, theatre show sneak peaks, what’s on in the area and a variation of TV/Showbiz packages. I believe Access worked so well because the team knew who their target audience was, and pushed to get the best packages possible. In my opinion, I think it would be very beneficial to carry on with Access in WINOL in the future, as I believe it brings in a lot of traffic to the site. 

Sport has improved a lot from the start of the term, with each sport reporter obviously becoming more familiar with what techniques they should be using when filming. By the end of term, reporters began adding graphics to their packages which I think was brilliant as it added something new and exciting to the bulletin. Laura Allen, created some good packages on sport such as her Volleyball package, where she got involved in the sport, which makes the story far more interesting. Ultimately, you have more leeway with sport as it’s fun and you can be more creative than you can with news. 

For the whole of my second year, I was the editor of Absolute:ly magazine, our fashion features section. Although I was happy with how things were going within my role, I was given the new role of Social Media Editor this semester which was a pleasant surprise. Despite my apprehension at the beginning of term, I have tried my hardest to do the best job possible.

On a weekly basis, I maintained our WINOL twitter feed, tweeting what was going on that week and re-tweeting anything good the reporters had said about their package. I also used Facebook to update what was going on in regards to the bulletin. Every Monday morning I used Google Analytics to see how many hits www.winol.co.uk had received each day in the past week. Google Analytics simply relates to how many people have gone on our site through typing it into Google. I also used alexa.com to see how we were ranking both globally and in the UK in comparison to other student journalism sites and other local news websites. Most weeks I sent an email out on a Wednesday to faculty groups around the Uni letting them know what our top headlines were in the bulletin, what time it was on and also about features and other things going on in WINOL.

One of my aims this term as the new social media editor was to try and get reporters and feature writers to send me pictures of their stories/features to put on to a Tumblr website. Unfortunately, this didn’t go to plan as I wasn’t getting enough pictures in regularly to make the Tumblr account look professional enough. For the next social media editor, I would recommend making it a necessity for people to take a good picture on every package or feature they do, therefore it will mean there is enough images coming in to make it look professional. 

A main success this term has been the use of Twitter. At the beginning of the term I told the rest of the team how it would be beneficial to start using their Twitter accounts to talk about their particular package/feature that week, and step by step tweet about what was going on. Not only this, but to tag relevant people in to each tweet, as it then promotes WINOL as a whole, gets us more followers and individually makes people look more professional. All in all I think this had a positive effect in terms of social media, as we now have a total of 1,566 followers on Twitter and are getting more each week. Not only this but names such as Geoff Hill, editor of ITV, Rowenna Davis and other well known names have praised the work we do at WINOL, which is something extremely positive to take away.

One of my favourite parts of this term was my interview with Rosie Mullender, Deputy Features Editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Shona Race and I, along with Faith Thomas who filmed the interview, went up to London to interview Rosie. Although the interview itself went extremely well, we occurred a few problems on the way. One of which was the use of both the cameras, unfortunately due to the small space we were allocated, we set up the cameras so we were ‘crossing the line‘ which made the editing process very difficult. Ultimately, it is something we have all learnt from and all in all it was a great experience.

There are many things that can improved upon in terms of social media for next term. One of those things is the way sport and social media connect. The sport team have some brilliant contacts with many local sports teams and if social media can be used correctly alongside the sport team it could achieve a lot of success. All of the local sports teams have many followers and if we can target them in the correct way, using social media sites and things like forums, we could create a great bond with specific clubs and their fans. Another thing is to find the best way to access circulation figures. At the beginning of the term slim stat, an app on wordpress, was causing problems to our site so it had to be taken off. For a certain amount of time we could only using google analytics, which only showed the figures from the google search when a lot of our views come through Twitter.

As a whole, WINOL has done well this term however there is room for some improvements. In relation to features, we need to have less editorial roles, and more writers as it will then mean we will get more content put up on the site on a regular basis. More care and attention needs to be put in to the text stories on the website, assigning people to do this on certain days of the week like last term, may be a way to get around this problem. Regarding news, I believe sometimes by changing our news editor on a weekly basis, it makes it slightly more difficult to stay on top of what is going on. Maybe assigning a third year pupil the role of news editor for a term, would allow for more consistency and hopefully an easier run when dealing with the bulletin each week. 

A large issue that needs to be addressed is our target audience. Many of our guest editors this term have highlighted the fact that we need to be more certain on who our target audience actually is. We have always been unsure whether to focus simply on students and around the campus, or be a local news outlet. Ultimately I think we can push ourselves to be a local news outlet as these are the types of stories we have been covering. Once we are certain on who are target audience is, I believe WINOL was start to thrive.