Final Year Project

Critical Reflection

For my Final Year Project, I took over as Editor of the features section of WINOL from the 16th December until 16th March with the intention of using my editorial experience and journalism skills to improve the quality of the content and the forward planning of articles as well as circulation of the magazine through the use of social media, advertising and social media. After a discussion with my tutor I also added the challenge to organise a re-launch event for the magazine that included special celebrity guests and to write a series of articles to accompany the other students work for the magazine.

The first month was spent researching both other online student editorials and magazines that looked at the areas covered by our magazine section, looking into article ideas and pegs and preparing the site so that it would be ready to be used at the beginning of the semester, as documented in the accompanying scrapbooks.

After gathering the team together for the first features meeting, my tutor and I discussed with the team the possibility of changing the format from a very text focused format to video after the success the previous semester of Access Winchester. This would increase the multimedia aspect of the site, which had proved popular in the past, and make the features section more modern and innovative but would require a very abrupt change of plans. After much debating, the new style was adopted and I spent time over the week briefing my team in detail as none of them had filmed for Access Winchester before and, as the majority were MAs, had little to no experience in filming packages. Together, we went through examples of previous Access Winchester videos, going through the style and structure and highlighting both the techniques used and the things to improve upon or adopt when filming. I also took the opportunity to explain SEO checking, how to upload and save work and the importance of using creative commons photos & not breaching copyright amongst other things. The feedback I received from the group was very positive and they seemed happy and prepared to use this format. However, after further discussions the following week with my tutor, the structure was changed again as we had not factored in the inexperience of the team when it came to using cameras. This would mean that the quality of the videos were unlikely to be up to standard and therefore having a high quality, regular video published on the site would be difficult. Instead, as we had such a small and fairly inexperienced team, a plan to merge the features and news sites by making the features a column section was put into place.

With these changes and delays, it has been difficult to follow my original plans. For example, the event was no longer relevant and there was not a place in either of the new structures for my original article idea. However this taught me a great lesson in adapting and, after the original change in structure, I changed my article to a weekly video package called “Hanniversaries” based around the idea of “On This Day” style features but taking a more comic view of the week anniversaries of major events that week. When this was changed, I found that I needed to spend a lot more time guiding my team than I had anticipated and this, combined with the fact there was not a section for me to write for, made me decide to work a lot closer with the team rather than spend time writing my own articles.

Where my focus has fallen upon improving the content and training the team, plans improve the circulation of the features and the number of page views we have received have slipped. Partially, this is because working out the views for the features section has been difficult since integrating it into the news site and so figures collected should be treated with a pinch of salt. Other contributing factors could include that the content has not been very regularly updated and many articles have not been SEO checked which should have boosted its position in search engine results. However I believe the major factor is that the work on the features section was not publicised on social networking sites very well which, from previous experience as the Social Media Editor of WINOL, I know is often a major factor in the success of a site or an article’s viewing figures. Becoming too focused on helping the team and the content of the site, I neglected to use social media in a way that would aid our features section’s circulation and reputation which has lowered the average number of page views.

Originally, when the features site was separate, tracking the statistics was possible using the ‘SlimStat’ plugin on the WordPress site which would tell us the overall page views, most popular sections and sources from which our audience would get to our work amongst other data. However, by moving the features to become a part of the news site obtaining accurate figures for the page views specifically of our section was tricky and the solution that I found of finding out the percentage of views for our category and using that with the average page views of the site is not a very accurate science. Even baring this in mind though, the figures for features do not make for good reading with an average before Christmas of around 116 views per day dropping to an average of 45 per day over the past month. However compared to the previous month, this average has almost doubled from 28, which shows that interest in the work of the features team has improved significantly over time.

It is likely that the reason interest in features has increased over time is down to the fact that overall quality of the content has improved. At the very beginning, there were a lot of legal issues surrounding copyright and malice. In some of the first few articles, the images used were copyright rather than creative commons licenced which meant the pictures were essentially stolen. Whilst I noticed this and did not publish it, either the journalist or another person with access to the posts and the ability to publish them put it up briefly. This highlights another issue that I came across whilst working on the features section: ineffective communication. Where the roles this semester were less defined than in the last and sometimes overlapped, some articles were published by subs on other teams before I was able to properly approve the overall article which meant that some articles were not as high quality as I would have liked when originally published. Another thing that has been difficult for similar reasons is keeping the front page section for the columnists up to date; as I was not trained to do this and the front page editor was reluctant to teach me, I had to rely on her to edit it in a way that I felt was appropriate. Whilst this was done, it made the task much more complicated than was necessary.

The overall experience of being the features editor has taught me a lot about both planning and adapting said plans to fit in with altering circumstances and reminded me of the importance of social media in increasing circulation of editorial websites. It has also reinforced in my mind the importance of clear communication and job roles, effective leadership and good legal and ethical training in the journalism world. If I were to do this project again, I would use social media more effectively, try to improve the use communication and hierarchy to make it more efficient, keep the features on its own separate site to make tracking progress of the features site easier and ensure that plans and structure were firmly in place a lot earlier in the process to avoid wasting time at the beginning of the process. I would also suggest that a lot off difficulties arise from having your FYP overlap with course teaching and training as many of the aims and needs of each are opposing, making merging the requirements for each tricky and resulting in some aims having to be neglected.


Research Scrapbooks: