BLOG #4: NEWSDAY
For Newsday, I was assigned the role of Editor for the Orange Team which consisted of Shannon on News, Harriet for Politics, Meghan for Sport and then Maxim for Photo and Video, Nicky for social media and Ivan for podcast. I’m not going to lie when the roles were announced and I realised I’d been assigned editor, I felt 90% nervous and 10% flattered. The thought of having the weight of a team and Limerick Voice standards on my shoulders felt quite intimidating but once I got over the initial shock of it, I was excited to take on the challenge.
I set up a group-chat with all members of my team after the session they were announced and immediately asked people to start generating ideas for their stories. We then set up a zoom call to familiarise ourselves with each other and to thrash out ideas and see where to go next. It wasn’t long before a plan started to come together! It was just getting past the planning stage into action that proved a little trickier.
By this morning, most of our stories were almost or entirely completed. Shannon was covering the motion of no confidence in Leo Varadkar debate and had made contact with Local Sinn Fein TD, Maurice Quinlivan who gave her an interview to accompany the story. For politics, Harriet covered a story on the Paris Agreement and in conjunction with sport, Meghan covered the UL Bohemian Rugby Clubs new ‘be a good teammate’ campaign, encouraging people to follow health guidelines.
All in all, everything worked out relatively well and according to plan.
There were a number of hiccups along the way, which as editor, I tried to minimise as much as possible in order to keep the team and task on track. Firstly, I think there was some misunderstanding on Harriet’s part regarding the purpose of Newsday and the task at hand. The story she produced on The Paris Agreement raised some interesting points and had the bones of what could have been a good opinion piece but given the task was producing a political news story for Limerick Voice, I felt it was best to take a more factual approach and so for a finish, I pretty much rewrote the entire story from information I sourced online. I asked Harriet about getting a local angle on things but since she is in Mayo, has little contacts in Limerick and is self admittedly bad with online communication, it was another dead end. Perhaps if the assignment wasn’t so tight on time, I could have helped guide Harriet more and helped her source interviewees but on this occasion, as this wasn’t an option and time was ticking, I decided the best root was to source a Limerick angle myself.
I got in touch with Saoirse Exton, a Limerick activist and leader of Limerick’s Friday for Future, and she sent me a voice recording commenting on the government’s failure to meet the Paris Agreement and climate change in general. As a backup, I actually also reached out to another environmental activist group in Limerick, Limerick Against Pollution, who kindly gave me a quote and sent on a press release for a recent development in their battle against Limerick Cement Factory. However, I decided not to run with this source and their information as I felt it would make for a great story on it’s own so perhaps you will see this appear later in the week in Limerick Voice.
I must admit it did really add pressure having to source the information on this story, write it and sort interviewees whilst also trying to manage a team and edit all their content in time for deadlines.
When it came to recording the snippet for the bulletin, Harriet seemed to misunderstand the task and kept sending recordings directly addressing “Ivan”. The mic quality was also bad so after a couple of attempts, I decided it was best to pass the job over to Nicky who happily accommodated me.
Ideally, if I had more time I would have given Harriet some guidance on this stuff for future reference but given the time-sensitivity of the assignment, I couldn’t afford to.
Prioritising deadlines, good quality content and efficient time management led me to doing a number of tasks myself. One of which was sourcing the images. As we had our stories planned in advance, it was possible for our Photo and Video editor to begin sourcing images before Newsday and prepare a folder with images for each story which she did. Unfortunately, it just so happened that the images were quite low in quality and in my opinion, were not appropriate for Limerick Voice standards. I voiced these concerns to the editor and advised trying the likes of Unsplash to source copyright free images but when I had not received any by the morning of Newsday, I decided to have a look myself and put a selection of images together. I mentioned this in my team meeting the morning of Newsday- touching on the fact the images submitted were not of high enough quality but I think things got lost in translation and in hindsight I should have been more clear and perhaps, should have left the sourcing of images to the editor in charge and not myself. Again, it just came down to time sensitivity- producing good quality content and meeting the deadline was my priority and it just felt in this instance, the most efficient route to that was finding the images myself.
Meghan and Shannon were also both reporters and they both wrote excellent stories.
Other than that, the day went well- stressful, but well. We met all deadlines and I learned a lot about making the decisions that best serve the task at hand- even if they are tough ones. I must say, without Ivan and Nicky, I don’t think the day would have went as smoothly. They were both a great help and we stayed in close contact all day. Although Nicky’s official role was as social media manager, she willingly helped Ivan with any podcasting queries he had and she also happily stood in to read Harriet’s bulletin when I asked her to. It was an interesting assignment and a fun one.. but I’m glad it’s over!
