Improved slide show.
Friday 18 November 2011
Tuesday 15 November 2011
9 Minute Factual Programme Ideas
A doctumentary on how the media portrays/stereotypes young people.
We will show:
We will show:
- How young people feel about it. -We will be using interviews to show this.
- How elderly people think about it. -We will be using interviews to show this.
- Riots - Did the media exaggerate?
- Are gangs as bad as we think they are?
- Would people be as scared of them if it wasn't for the media?
News show script.
News channel script
Voiceover headlines: (brief on what is coming up on the news today.) You are watching the news with Charlie and Annie. The headlines today…
Matt: (Video/picture comes up of Sainsburys) Sainsbury’s goes bankrupt. (changes to video of university) University becomes unaffordable. (video / picture of Olympic stadium in the process of being built) Will the Olympic stadium be finished in time? (video footage with an over shoulder shot of Jk Rowling signing a book) Jk Rowling’s opens up. And now to the studio…
Studio
Annie: Good evening to you all. My name is Annie.
Charlie: My name is Charlie and you are watching
Annie: Do you shop in sainsburys? Well not for much longer!
Charlie: Since June 2011 Sainsburys have secretly been rapidly losing money as a result they are selling off all of their chain stores to their competitors. We have more info on this, over to Charlotte who is in Henley-on-thames at one of the many supermarkets affected by this.
Charlotte: Thankyou Charlie, here I am with one of the many staff that have lost their jobs due to the bankruptcy
Charlotte: (turns to look at staff member) How are you going to deal with having no job at the moment? Have you been offered any other jobs?
Staff member: I’ve only just finished university and have been doing this job for 6 months hoping to pay of my debts to the university fees and start working on getting my own flat. What annoys me the most about what has happened to me and everyone else that works at Sainsbury’s is that nearly all of us have not been offered a new job or given advice on where to go looking for one.
Charlotte: thank you for your time. (the staff member walks out of the camera shot). You may want to take this next bit of news with a grain of salt because we are not 100% on it at the moment but it is believed that Tesco’s has been deliberately competing with Sainsbury’s to put them out of business and buy all of their major location chain stores of them which is exactly what has happened. Instead of Tesco’s hiring the Sainsbury’s staff to run the new chain stores they are advertising job interviews to work there which has upset a great amount of people who used to work for Sainsbury’s. Back to the studio.
Annie: More bad news for people who are intending on going to university in the future…
Annie: A large majority of universities based in the UK have heightened their attendance fees making it very difficult for the majority of people to afford it. So as well as it being difficult to get a place in universities it’s now expensive to get a place in university. A protest is going to take place in a few months’ time which I’m sure will mainly consist of students.
Annie: A lot of students have been applying to foreign universities in particular Holland because of their much smaller prices to go to university. The cost in Holland is about 1/3 of what it would cost in most UK universities. We have asked some of the Uk’s top universities for interviews on the matter but we were suspiciously declined by all. Over to you Charlie.
(Perhaps in this part of the news report we could have the narrator talking over footage that resembles the topic)
Charlie: As you should all know, The 2012 London Olympics is coming up very close, a month ago The Olympic stadium was going in the right direction for being finished on time, however a massive problem has occurred with the funding. Sainsbury’s which was the 2012 Olympics biggest sponsor and investor has gone bankrupt putting the 2012 Olympics into a debt of £300,000.0000. The government have promised to pay off the debt in the next year but said they would not be able to pay it off before the Olympics started.
However the building companies that are working on the stadium are protesting and have stopped building the stadium saying that they will only continue once their money has been paid off to them. This leaves the government in a sticky situation between paying of the debt for the Olympics or using that money to go towards Greece to help the country get its economy back up and running.
Here’s Annie with the final story of today.
Annie: Today in Trafalgar square Jk Rowling was doing a book signing for her famously known harry potter books which have been remade into films and loved by the public just as much as the books. JK Rowling is currently touring around the UK signing books for all her fans but today was different.
JK Rowling announced that she was making a new series of books based of the Harry potter novels but when asked more questions would not say anything else about the matter. And that’s it for now until next time.
Thursday 10 November 2011
Aileen: Life and death of a serial killer
Questions on Aileen
(The opening 6 minutes)
Which types of footage are used in the opening? Why do you think the different types have been used – what is their function? Interviews, photo's - introducing the main players and giving the history and background.
What documentary techniques can you identify in the sequence? Voice-overs, photo's interviews and video clips of actual footage.
What information is given by the voiceover? What is the relationship between the voiceover and the images? The voiceover explains the images in more detail - He's diarising.
What do we find out about the central subject? She's a hitch hiking hooker that killed men but claims it's self defence.
How is the opening sequence of a documentary similar to the opening sequence of a fiction film? They introduce the characters - for example the family members, victims, voice-over and Aileen herself, you understand the 'plot' by the beginning and understand what she has done and a bit about what made her do it.
Make notes on the following as you watch the documentary (UPLAOD to your blogs under the heading Aileen: Life and death of a serial killer)
1. Name of documentary: Aileen: Life and death of a serial killer
2. Date of production: 2003
3. Film maker/producer? Jo Human
4. Sub-genre(s)? Crime, mystery and thriller
5. Context of production: America
6. Purpose or purposes? To find out once and for all why she is getting the death century and why it was against her.
8. Use of selection: Only the media’s and Aileen’s point of view was in the documentary, this may have been so you felt sorry for Aileen even though you know you shouldn’t.
9. Narrative sequence and editing? The cross cutting between nick and the news was really effective as you got both sides of the story from 2 different types of shows.
10. Narration/commentary? There was a lot of narration from nick which was a lot like the voice of God.
11. Use of interviews? The documentary had a lot of interviews in it which was really effective as you got the live feel.
12. Presence of crew? The only presence of crew you got throughout the documentary was nick while he was interviewing.
13. Non-diegetic sound and use of music? Most of the music heard was found in the video clips and pictures of her past but at the very end the song that played at her wake was played which may pull a few heart strings. This is when it feels real to me.
Tuesday 1 November 2011
News Values
look at impact what sort of methods?
- clips
- interviews
- music
- sound effects
- words used
- press conference
- diagrams
- live stream
list news stories,
TOP STORY- st pauls - politics, resesions
Nick clegg - billion pounds
billionaires
7 billion baby born
look at presenter, how is she sat?
straight
upright
What makes a story newsworthy?
Impact
Audience identification
Pragmatics of media coverage
What are news values?
News values are general guidelines or criteria that determine the worth of a news story and how much prominence it is given by newspapers or broadcast media. They are fundamental to understanding news production and the choices that editors and other journalists face when deciding that one bit of information is news while another is not.
According to former Times and Sunday Times Editor, Harold Evans, a news story…
… is about necessary information and unusual events
… should be based on observable facts
… should be an unbiased account
… should be free from the reporter’s opinion
Evans, Harold ‘’ Editing and Design: Volume 1’’ (1972)
However, the selection of news stories is subject to a wider range of influences than this simple basic definition.
The selection of news stories
What makes a story newsworthy?
Information arrives in the newsroom from a wide range of sources minute by minute. A news editor cannot report all this material, so he must be selective and filter out information that is not newsworthy. Because he is in competition with other news outlets, he highlights only those stories he considers to be of greatest interest to his readers or audience.
Reports, which are interesting and newsworthy, are distinguished by a broadly agreed set of characteristics called ‘’news values’’. These values provide journalists with a mechanism to sort through quickly, process and select the news from that vast amount of information made available to them.
In practice, when a journalist makes a judgment as to whether a story has the necessary ingredients to interest his readers, he will decide informally on the basis of his experience and intuition, rather than actually ticking off a checklist. Even so, many studies of news production show that most of these factors are consistently applied across a range of print, broadcast, and online news organisations worldwide.
Galtung and Ruge’s list of news values
One of the best known lists of news values was drawn up by media researchers Johan Galtung and Marie Holmboe Ruge. They analysed international news stories to find out what factors they had in common, and what factors placed them at the top of the news agenda worldwide.
Although their research was conducted over three decades ago 1965, virtually any media analyst's discussion of news values will refer to most of the characteristics they list. This list provides a kind of scoring system: a story which scores highly on each value is likely to come at the start of a television news bulletin, or make the front page of a newspaper.
The values they identified fall into three categories:
Impact
1. Threshold: The bigger impact the story has, the more people it affects, the more extreme the effect or the more money or resources it involves, the better its chances of hitting the news stands.
2. Frequency: Events, such as motorway pile-ups, murders and plane crashes, which occur suddenly and fit well with the newspaper or news broadcast's schedule are more readily reported than those which occur gradually or at inconvenient times of day or night. Long-term trends are unlikely to receive much coverage.
3. Negativity: Bad news is more exciting than good news. Stories about death, tragedy, bankruptcy, violence, damage, natural disasters, political upheaval or simply extreme weather conditions are always rated above positive stories such as royal weddings or celebrations. Bad news stories are more likely to be reported than good news because they are more likely to score high on other news values, such as threshold, unexpectedness, unambiguity and meaningfulness,
4. Unexpectedness: If an event is out of the ordinary it will be more likely to make it into the news than an everyday occurrence would. As Charles A. Dana famously put it: ''"if a dog bites a man, that's not news. But if a man bites a dog, that's news!"''
5. Unambiguity: Events which are easy to grasp make for better copy than those which are open to more than one interpretation, or where understanding of the implications depends on first understanding the complex background to the event.
Audience identification
1. Personalisation: People are interested in people. News stories that centre on a particular person, and are presented from a human interest angle, are likely to make the front page, particularly if they involve a well-known person. Some people claim this news value has become distorted, and that news editors over-rate personality stories, especially those involving celebrities.
2. Meaningfulness: This relates to cultural proximity and the extent to which the audience identifies with the topic. Stories about people who speak the same language, look the same, and share the same preoccupations as the audience receive more coverage than those involving people who do not.
3. Reference to elite nations: Stories concerned with global powers receive more attention than those dealing with less influential nations. This also relates to cultural proximity. Those nations which are culturally closest to our own will receive most of the coverage.
4. Reference to elite persons: The media pay attention to the rich, powerful, famous and infamous. Stories about important people get the most coverage. Hence, the American President gets more coverage than your local councillor.
Pragmatics of media coverage
1. Consonance: Stories which match the media's expectations receive more coverage than those which contradict them. At first sight, this appears to contradict the notion of unexpectedness. However, consonance refers to the media's readiness to report an item, which they are more likely to do if they are prepared for it. Indeed, journalists often have a preconceived idea of the angle they want to report an event from, even before they get there.
2. Continuity: A story which is already in the news gathers a kind of momentum – the running story. This is partly because news teams are already in place to report the story, and partly because previous reportage may have made the story more accessible to the public.
3. Composition: Stories must compete with one another for space in the media. For instance, editors may seek to provide a balance of different types of coverage. If there is an excess of foreign news, for instance, the least important foreign story may have to make way for an inconsequential item of domestic news. In this way the prominence given to a story depends not only on its own news value but also on those of competing stories. This is a matter of the editors' judgement, more than anything else.
- press conference
- diagrams - timeline
- live stream
- narrator
- interviews
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