WINOL Week Eight

On Monday it turned out that the focus of the bulletin should be a 'budget special' - and that we were all supposed to be doing packages based on any far reaching effects the budget might have.

I settled for the nicely vague theme of 'local businesses'. A handful of shops in Winchester had or were in the process of closing down and this meant all I had to do was contact these stores to get a case study. I arranged this on Monday along with what I thought would be the balancing interview and then went to film on Tuesday morning. She was incredibly helpful and happy to let me film sequences and cutaways. During her interview, however, she mentioned the person I was going to contact for balance and I realised that they were on the same 'side' - so that wouldn't work. She also knocked the local City Council and blamed the store's closure on their lack of support.

I emailed and rang the press officer for the council and stated that a local business owner had criticised the council in my story and if they gave me an interview with a councillor that this was a chance for them to provide a rebuttal. Sure enough, I was given an interview with the council leader the very same day.

I felt lucky that I managed to get a quote out of him in the extremely short period we were given - he had to dash off to a meeting two minutes after we arrived.

After filming some more cutaways in the town centre, I put all of my efforts in to my script. I'm glad that I had a day to play with it as my first and second drafts really weren't that good, and again Chris had to go through it with me to cut away the fat.

I'm really happy with the way my package turned out this week but I don't feel like it was particularly down to much skill on my part - there was a great deal of luck involved in getting that council interview and the case study in the shop. Without those elements everything would have fallen through and I didn't have any sort of back-up story.