ALICE WASS
Exploring Media

As it is getting closer to Christmas the office and amount of work and deadlines is starting to reduce and instead we are more focused on preparing for the New Year. After such a busy few weeks starting new ‘on air’ projects, attending podcast and TV shoots, helping with Appeals, Prayer Breakthroughs and more it is relaxing to have a slower pace. Even though in general I do prefer being busy.

This week I have continued booking in more interviews for Ruth for January. I feel that I need to get ahead of myself with the bookings as I will have two weeks off for Christmas and therefore will be behind on bookings for February. This was not helped by having to re-arrange some interviews planned for January now needing to be used in February due to the ill health of some interviewees and no longer being able to keep their commitments due to personal circumstances. However, this is teaching me how to be more flexible and improve my problem solving skills.

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I was suddenly asked to help TV with a shoot they needed to do for Bob Gas’s Christmas Party with a deadline for the next day. Bob Gas is the writer of Word For Today, and therefore I needed to go through all our Word For Today testimonies, pick out the best show them to TV and once they had picked their favourites print them out and mount them on special card for the recording that afternoon. This has encouraged me to look into the possibility of being able to help more with in house TV projects come the New Year as I would be interested in learning about the planning and admin side of TV as that would be part of my role if I was to become a TV producer.

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I have had a lot of Soundcloud audio to upload this week. I then used these new uploads to find the best Christmas themed content to send onto Kat to put in the UCB2 Newsletter. This time it involved talking to the presenters to find out what content they have recently done which they would think is their best, and what upcoming content they have.

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I had a long talk with Samuel about working in radio, particularly as a presenter. I found out more about the difficulties of finding content especially around Christmas and New Year and how they manage to keep the shows interesting when there is nothing new to talk about. I mentioned my concerns about running out of interviews for Ruth’s shows and Samuel has helped to take away those worries as he explained that the wonderful thing about Ruth’s show is that every single person has a story, some may not be that interesting but every single person does have one. I just need to reach out to people and find out their stories so then I will never run out of interviews.  I also asked more about the specialist pre-record shows they all do. I was surprised to discover that most of the presenters were given a specialist show to do, and it was not something they have picked to do themselves.

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Anne has asked me to help with one of the segments on her show ‘The Wall’, as the person we are recording is based in America and therefore is in a different time zone. As I had sat in with her before when she was doing the recording I feel confident in doing one for her. I have reached out to the individual to try and get a date for the beginning of next week.

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Other tasks I have completed this week include, working on my newest ILM Managing Workplace Projects task. As this task involves a finance aspect I had a meeting with David Withers to find out some pre-information I needed for it. Also retrospectively I have been filling in an activities log containing the main tasks I have done every day since I started at UCB. Now I can do this going forward.

This week was also the Presenters Christmas breakfast outing where we all did secret Santa. I really enjoyed the outing as it was nice to spend time with the team I work with outside of the office. I really feel I am part of the team and this is something which is very important to me when finding places to work as a good support network makes a big difference.

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Next week is my last week of work before I have holiday leave for Christmas, which I hope will not be a very hectic week so that I can get on with preparing more content for Ruth’s show for the New Year then when I return have too much stress having to find lots of content on a tight deadline.