planning and research stages

research and Planning
Due to lots of recording and helping ruhul with the technical side i have neglected my blog so i thought i would write a review summing up our research and planning.

As a group our task was produce a 5-8 minute News piece for radio, we had previously used the radio equipment during our preliminary task and so were used to the equipment such as the mike and knew the computer program: Audacity we were also lucky enough to have Audacity on ruhul's laptop which meant we could work from home aswell

For our initial research we listened too and analysed some established radio stations se we could see how they did it. we decided to do our analysis a little different to other groups as we chose a more diverse group of radio stations instead of all local and london stations. the radio stations we chose were Heart FM, Radio 1 and Bolton FM in this research we focused on the language used to influence our piece for example we didnt use slang in our news piece as during the news segments on these stations we used formal and direct language

some up of radio stations(check blog for more detail)

Heart is the local station for London but also goes national, this made it very interesting. It played popular music and has a memorable jingle ‘This is Heart’ which is a very recognisable jingle. The news segment was sharp and included all the top headlines, but also featured a section of local news to the capital. As a listener I enjoyed Heart and found it easy to listen too although locally I thought it could have been more in depth.

BBC Radio 1 is a national station and one I had listened too before. They play chart music and have celebrity presenters such as Chris Moyles, Veron Kay and Fearne Cotton. Although many of the presenters on Radio 1 are very good it became apparent that being a television celebrity does not make you natural at radio, and many would trail off with uninteresting tales of their own lives. The news section covered the main stories but the shows were generally centred around music and light hearted ‘banter’.

96.5 Bolton FM is the local station for Bolton in Lancashire. The initial sound sounded less professional then the previous two sections but understandably they’d have a cheaper recording system. This station was very local and the news consisted of information about the local market and what the people of Bolton were up too. We needed to learn from this for when we presented our local news section.


From this point on me alex and ruhul had a brain storm about our radio news segment. We targeted it to be around 4 – 6 minutes long and include both local and nation stories, also including weather and sports, possibly ending with a light hearted story. In our preliminary piece we had branded ourselves as a light hearted team; this was backed up by our name ‘The Coconut Lounge’, and through our presenting we joked around and gave each other silly nicknames. All though there was nothing wrong with this in the right context, we felt as news presenters our final piece needed to be more serious and constructive. We ditched the nicknames and decided upon our 1st basic timeline which was as followed:



Jingle -30 seconds

Headlines – 1 minute

Main Story – 2 minutes

Vox-Pop (weather) – 30 seconds

Sports – 1 minute

Light Story to end on (interview) – 1 minute

This basic plan gave us bones to work on so that we could build our piece. The idea behind this that we wanted to include as much as possible such as vox-pops and a jingle without overdoing it and rushing our show. We were definitely in the planning stage of our final piece.

We began to choose the news stories we wished to present.

Headlines were to be up to date and researched on the day as we didn’t need to practise talking about them, this was also to be true of weather, we would report on how it was at the time.

Our Main Story was to be the earthquake in Haiti and the aftermath of that.

Sports would include the John Terry affair and up to date scores.

The light hearted story would be a man with a large crocodile collection.

We chose real life stories because we wanted to relate to our audience and allow them to feel emotion for the news. We also chose the stories we did because they interested us and so any excitement or sorrow in our voices would be real and there for better. We began to script sections:

Alex: A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake has struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti.
The extent of the devastation is still unclear but there are fears thousands of people may have died.
Haiti's worst quake in two centuries hit south of the capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, wrecking the presidential palace, UN HQ and other buildings.

Liam: A "large number" of UN personnel were reported missing by the organisation. Many people have spent the night outside amid fears of more aftershocks

Once we had planned and scripted it all our Time Line changed and looked more like this:

Jingle 20-30 seconds
News headlines 20-30 seconds
Main story in depth 1 minute
Vox pop 30 seconds to be carried out on location
Funny news stories 20-30 seconds
Football news 20-30 seconds
Weather 20-30 seconds
Local weather
Vox pop 30 seconds on location
Jingle 20-30 seconds
This change showed our piece was progressing all the time and we knew we were moving forwards.