WINOL: Week 4 Review

I found my story on Monday morning in a small piece about tuition fees in the Times. In a box that accompanied the story they revealed the amount Winchester University would be charging for tuition fees in the future.

This was obviously a massive story for a university news service, one that would interest staff and students alike and I was given top story for the week.

My first step was attempting to varify the claims with the university. I attempted to speak to Tommy Geddes who is in charge of finances, but he refused to speak to me. I later emailed him and was given a rather swift “no comment” in return. This was great news as effectively the university was refusing to deny the story.

As I am education correspondent I am more often than not using shots of the university. It is becoming quite tough to not just use my standard “shot of student without revealing the identity” so I had to find some new shots of the uni. These included a blurred shot of students in the learning cafe (blurred in post production) and some zooms and pans to make buildings and signs more appealing.

My interviews this week were with students at the university. I asked them if they would still be here if they were charged £7,500 a year. One of my interviewees gave a particularly good set of answers. After some advice from our guest editor (Tom Hepworth from South Today) I now think it would have been better to have used him in a case study, perhaps highlighting his financial situation by going shopping with him or cooking baked beans to produce a good shot sequence.

The backgrounds to my interviews were again poor. I placed my interviewees in front of a window and therefore there faces looked quite dark when I got the footage back to the news room. Again, with the help of FinalCut I managed to make them look half decent by making their faces lighter.

I worked with Sam Harper this week to produce some graphics to illustrate how much the fees would be in comparison with now. I was really happy with the outcome, Sam had done a great job. But, as Tom was watching it back I could see the confusion on his face. Basically, I had asked for too much detail on screen at one time. He advised me to keep them much simpler in future.

During the week I actually managed to find the source of the leak of the Times but decided to keep that under wraps.

All in all a good week editorially, I'm more than happy with getting top story, but still a lot to work on technically.