Critical Review

This was my last semester on Winol and by far my least enjoyable. The two previous semesters I had spent on Winol I had enjoyed on the most part. In my first I was swept in by it all, and overwhelmed by the professionalism of the students. I immediately decided that I wanted to produce my packages on sport with a view to trying features in the future. I produced what I consider my best package to date in the first year. I was covering a national sports story in that Portsmouth Supporters Trust were looking to buy the Club. I managed to get interviews with a former Portsmouth player, Vince Hilaire, as well as the ‘most famous football fan in Britain’ John PFC Westwood. To add to this I also managed to get free run of Fratton Park therefore my shots were varied and impressive. I uploaded the package onto youtube and it managed to  receive over 400 views. I was also approached to see if it could be used for a football website. For second year I decided to stay on Sport hoping to get more stories as oppose to highlights. I was given the role of University Sports Reporter. This role wasn’t as simple as it suggests as it was a struggle to get news worthy packages so I found myself looking away from the University for stories. In my opinion my best package of that term was my piece on Olympic hopeful Greg Bridet. Bridet had been shortlisted for the Olympic Boxing squad for the 2016 Olympics in Rio, and as he boxes out of Portsmouth I thought it would make for a good story. I was very lucky in that Bridet’s Coach Quentin Shillingford was used to cameras being in his gym and allowed me to get all the shots and interviews I needed. Towards the end of my second semester on sport I started to find myself feeling aggrieved about the lack of feedback we would get on our packages as the main focus was on Winol. I thought I had produced some good quality packages but had heard nothing back about them.  

Coming into this semester I was hoping to be given a new role as I had stated that I wanted a new challenge on Winol and liked the sound of doing some features for the website. I had come up with several ideas that I wanted to pursue but was left disappointed when I found myself once again as part of the sports team. The problem was I had lost interest in Sport and was struggling to find good stories once again. My first few stories of the year were packages I put together for the sake of having something in and thus lacked content and I had to resort to the sort of 'Mickey Mouse' reporting I had always tried to avoid. My only other package of the year was a breakdancing feature, this was a better piece as I spent a lot more time editing the package and I was happy with the finished product, however at the end of the day I am well aware that I have not been able to achieve my full potential on sport. I personally consider Winol and Sportsweek two separate productions and despite the obvious connections I think people on Sports often find themselves slightly alienated from the rest of the group, which is frustrating. On Sport it is standard procedure to have your work completed by Tuesday, so in reality Wednesdays for people on sport don’t have to be spent in Tab but you still find yourself going in hoping to get some sort of feedback or acknowledgement more often than not to no avail. This was obviously not helped by Angus moving to Dubai as it made communication with him even rarer. At the start of the semester there was talk of having a few guest editors in who specialised in sport which really would have been beneficial to the department. However this never materialised and once again we were overlooked. This has always been an issue for me and has subsequently meant that I haven’t been giving the 100% I would have liked. A large problem I find with Winol is that no one seems fully sure who our target audience is. As we are a university course it makes sense to me to draw views from fellow students. However a lot of the time we deter students with stories that they quite simply will not care about. I was criticised by Gareth Messenger formerly of Winol as he asked why I was doing stories on University sports teams a lot of the time. My reply to Gareth would be that I believe we are overlooking University sport in favour of teams such as Winchester City who have less than 50 people turn up to watch games and doesn't draw people to the website. Whereas if we put together packages of University Sports or at least a weekly results section people from the numerous on campus teams would be interested. If I were Sports Editor, I would make sure that one of the better local teams; Eastleigh or Totton, were filmed but along with that I would make sure at least 2 or 3 Uni sports were filmed and maybe put together into a smaller package. I think establishing ourselves as the best source of on campus news is essential for the Winol brand and yet probably over half of the students don’t even know what Winol is. Apparently at its peak Sports week hit over a thousand views yet nowadays 300 views is considered good. I understand that cracking the University will be tough and probably wouldn't be the right route for Winol to go down but is definitely where I see Sports week’s future lying. I would also encourage people on sport to do as many features as possible, the Sports section can often be pretty boring and dull depending on results, a lighthearted fun feature offers a balance similar to an and finally piece.

       I know it’s been a good year for Winol and some of the work I have seen from others has been brilliant. Some people really have benefited from Winol people like Liam Garrahan and Harvey consistently  produce solid packages and I think they have massively benefited from Winol and will probably go onto have good careers on the back of what they've learnt from Winol. I think that the lack of a major event to cover was a shame because it’s a time when everyone pulls together and works as a team. In my opinion an event in the ilk of the BJTC would have helped the second years out a lot. For me when I helped out with the BJTC awards in my second year it was what originally sold me on Winol, as I saw the quality and professionalism of the Third years and it made me realise where I could be in a years time. The website has never looked better and I know that the website has been receiving a lot of hits. I liked the fact that more time was spent on expanding Winol with Access and Absolutely Fashion as this will undoubtedly bring in a lot more page views which at the end of the day is what we want. On a good day the buzz in the room is evident for everyone and come 5 o clock everyone is feeling good. Part of me will miss Winol as it has given me a good start for whatever route I decide to go down in life. I remember that the reason I decided to come to Winchester in the first place was after I came to an open day and was won over by Brian in the way he spoke about Winol. I immediately knew that this was the course I wanted to be on and I do feel like I could produce good quality packages now wherever I go which will be valuable when I apply for jobs and I feel like I have a good variety of packages that I will happily show to employees with confidence. I will always be very thankful to Brian and Chris for this as Documentary is where I would like to go.

       The whole course for me is too focused on Winol, there are other aspects of Journalism that we are all clearly lacking e.g written stories. Chris spent at least an hour going through the problems with some of the written stories that were lacking basic techniques due to the fact that we've never spent a great deal of time working on them. I can fully appreciate the fact that I’m on one of the best journalism courses in the country but I don’t think I’m the only one that currently feels like I would struggle to work for a newspaper at the moment. As far as Winol goes though I think the statistics speak for themselves. After all the awards Winol has been given since I joined there is no disputing that the course put together by Chris and Brian is a good one but not everyone benefits from putting so much focus on the broadcast aspect of journalism. This year apart from an optional shorthand class the only thing we had on our timetable was Winol. I’m not saying that this is a massive problem as Winol is time consuming but some of us haven’t written practically anything all semester and obviously that comes across in our written stories. This semester has hindered my time spent on Winol but despite that I did enjoy the first and second semester I spent on Winol.

Recently the large part of my time has been spent planning for my final year project; ‘Life after Football’. The plan is to interview ex footballers David James, Linvoy Primus and Lee Bradbury about where they decided to go after retiring from football.I decided upon this after reading the Linvoy Primus auto-biography a few months back. I found his book very inspirational and as it was brought out in 2005 whilst Linvoy was still playing I decided that I wanted to find out what he was up to myself, by interviewing him myself. The rest fell into place afterwards through contact I made with their clubs etc. I’m also hoping to follow each of the players around for a day a, in order to give people a real insight into their lives which I’m hoping will be interesting and also make my documentary more authentic and true to the format. I know David James works for BT Sport as a pundit and Bradbury works as Manager of Havant & Waterlooville who play in the Conference South. I’m hoping to make this Documentary about half an hour long, and I’m hoping to make it as fly on the wall as possible. I will be using all the tools and skills I have acquired on Winol to make this and I am confident Winol has provided me with the knowledge to do so.