ALICE WASS
Exploring Media

Week 28

Getting Ahead

This week has been interesting, mostly doing normal routine work which has given me a chance to carefully balance my work load so that I am pre-prepared for my East Holiday at the end of April. As I learnt at Christmas everything continues and then I have to play catch up for a few weeks. I want to make my return as relaxed as possible after my next holiday.

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This week I have been following up and trying to reach out to more interviews for Ruth’s show, occasionally I go through patches when this is more difficult and I am currently reaching that point now. I am struggling to find new content which would suit the show and therefore I am spending a lot of time researching with less success. I am now working to try and find new methods to do research into potential guests.

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I have continued with editing audio and uploading it to Soundcloud. How I am doing this has not yet changed, but I have started slowly clearing up Soundcloud. UCB have been using their Soundclould for about 7 years now with no clear order or organisation of audio. After UCB abandoned ‘Catch Up’ on their app they started putting more content onto Soundcloud, however they are planning a future move away from this and instead turn the best interviews into Podcasts to put on the app. As we do not know how long this move from Soundcloud to Podcasts will take I am trying to make Soundcloud as social media friendly as possible so that the audio I am putting on there is reaching our listeners even if they will not promote the platform on air. This means that I have started changing some audio to private, creating new playlists and deleting any content which is no longer being listened to which is over a year old. This is a slow and laborious process but it is important to make the platform more accessible for listeners.

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On top of my Soundcloud editing I did a last minute urgent Testimonies slot edit for Ruth’s show. The interview Ruth had was 30 minutes long and she needed it to be 10 – 15 minutes long. To help her out I went through and cut the interview and edited the sound of it to make it ready for when she came in to do her show the next morning. Ruth really liked the edit I did and appreciated me helping her when she was short of time. I am very confident in my audio editing abilities now and when listening to interviews I can work out where it is best to cut out content or perfect what they are saying to make the conversation flow better.

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Last week I was contacting people about recording Impact Stories to use in our May Appeal. This week I have recorded and edited two impact stories. I am also continuing to reach out to more people and book in more recordings. I have been putting all the information of who I contact and record onto Raisers Edge, which I always have to slightly re-learn as I do it months a part. However, each time I am picking it back up much quicker!

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I have continued to host guests for Ruth and also some of the other presenters this week. One of the guests on Ruth’s show this week, has Neurofibromatosis Type 2 (NF2), which meant that she was deaf. This meant that I had to fill in all the Health and Safety forms before her visit and be very aware of how I was talking with her as she was lip reading what I said. When it came to Emily doing her interview with Ruth we realised just before it went to air that Emily was struggling to lip read Ruth over the desk. Therefore, Ruth had to move to sit on the guest side of the desk to interview Emily and then I was sitting on the presenter side and running the live studio desk! I was not expecting to ever have an opportunity to do that. I was glad that I had regularly been using a similar desk to do Simon’s show ‘The Weekend Starts Here’ as I knew which buttons I needed to press. However, I was still very nervous as it was live on air and if I pressed anything wrong it would reflect badly on the show and on the station. Everything went well and I really enjoyed running the desk whilst Ruth did her interview. This is a job which Producers in some stations do and therefore really helpful that I have had a chance to experience this for both pre-recorded and live radio.

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Last weekend Samuel went to the Wintershall Rehearsals to record the interviews for the Easter Bank Holiday Special. This week we had a meeting to catch up about how they went and to work out what we are doing next. I have since listened to all of the interviews and tried to identify different themes which link between them, as well as trying to see how the interviews could be grouped and ordered to be most effective to the listener.

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Next week is the first week of April, which means I only have 4 months left working at UCB. The past 7 months have passed so quickly and I have enjoyed all of my time working here. As I am getting closer to finishing I am starting to look at possible graduate jobs available to prepare myself for applications once I start my final year of university.