evaluation

Our group’s final piece a short news piece for the radio, which was interesting and was fun to create. The developing of our piece was a long but well worth it as we met regularly in the recording room with the right equipment and software, the recording software we used was a basic version of Audacity.

As a group of seventeen year olds, any work we did was likely to represent the young community and show teenagers and produce serious work, this is shown though the more ‘gossip’ style sport stories such as the John Terry affair. Despite this we feel a news piece should represent all communities and social groups in a professional way and deliver news that everyone can benefit from, an example of this is our Haiti story that has touched many people of all ages, genders and race.

Being a radio piece, any radio institution could distribute our piece as nearly all of them have a news pieces. This is because there are different radio stations for different people such as: classical, sports and music. All people need the news and want to know if anything important has happened in the world. If I could choose a radio station it would be a well known national radio station that would give us the most reports and I would choose BBC Radio one. But perhaps because of our relaxed atmospheric talks and jokes I feel we would be broadcasted on the radio station heart, the reason I say this is because of how heart is lively and has that light hearted feeling towards it, so people do not feel serious about it.

As a news piece we would hope to have an audience to address as all people need the news to keep up to date with the world. This is proven by ‘The news at six’ being one of the most viewed programs and that news has spread to more niche markets such as children with ‘News Round’ and music lovers with ‘MTV News’. I feel if we released this and more regular news pieces, we would gather a large audience. If we were to go into advertising I would choose posters in the local area and possibly adverts in local newspapers because it would be slightly cheaper than national newspapers, but if money was not a problem then we would make a national television commercial because they are the most viewed of advertisements with majority of people watching television in the UK.

I have learnt a lot about technologies and the media business from going through this task. Before the task I did not know much about radio, knew about how radio was broadcasted through the knowledge in Information and computing technology (ICT) and about the software radios may use like Audacity only because I used different types of recording software in my spare time.

I had to research and learn how radio is recorded in the studio with programs like Audacity and recording equipment such as mikes. I had to get use to the microphone while recording so that the show would sound professional, the reason I had to get use to the microphone was because I had not realised how the microphone actually picked up sound and how sensitive it was. After a few days of practice with the microphone, I had got use to it and came out with good quality sound as shown through the quality of our piece.

Since our preliminary I feel that my group has drastically improved in both our presenting, technical and communication skills. Our speech was clearer and more direct while our editing and sound clips were a lot better, more useful and were added to the final piece. Because as a group we had thought I would be an easy task were it was not when it came to a practice recording of the preliminary which was only fifty to sixty seconds, we had struggled to use the program to its full potential and had no idea what to actually put in the practice recording. But after a while of recording our group was getting use to the program and the equipment.