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:

Semester 2 WINOL Roles

After our discussion in the debreif today, the roles for WINOL so far are:

Managing Editor - Vacant
News Editor - Rota
Features Editor - Hannah Hayesmore
Production Editor - Nicole Collas
Sport Editor - Drew Richardson
Front Page Editor - Emma Wright
News Anchor - Tate Slyfield
Chief Reporter - Alex Delaney
Politics - Calum Warren-Piper
Environment - Laura Allen (or Meg Fisher?)
Police and Crime - Bracken Stockley (?)
Health - Zeena Alobaidi
Education - Lucy Wilson
Crime & Court - Tom Wright
Community - (Meg Fisher?)
Transport - Vacant
Sci-Tech - Vacant
Business & Finance - Vacant
Production/Feature writer/Sub - Charlie Gardiner
European Election Editor - Karina Sleiman
European Election Producer - Nicole Collas

NB: The Editor role has been scrapped and the Managing Editor & Social Media Editor have been combined into one role.

Critical Reflection - Year 3 Semester 1

This semester’s WINOL team, comprised of 40 students, has worked hard to maintain and build upon the work from last year which has led to many innovations not only in the bulletin but also on the features & news sites.

Whilst, generally speaking, the overall quality of WINOL’s output has improved through these changes, the viewing figures have not reflected this. At the first look into our Alexa Rank in early October, we ranked #1,309,425 globally and #38, 579 in the UK which has only improved to #34,210 in the UK and #776,668 globally on the 8^th December. At its peak, on 30^th October, WINOL ranked #27,807 in the UK though only #1,192,940 globally. This mean that our website managed to go up by 10,772 ranks in around 1 month but, over the entire semester, only went up 4,369 places. Compared to the same semester last year, our rank has slipped by 23,872 places as we achieved a final rank of #10,338. During the second semester of last year, at our peak on the 6th March, we achieved a global rank of #372,251 and #9,154 in the UK, which are our best rankings on record and whilst our end figures came to #373,953 globally and #12,025 in the UK on 27^th March, we had gained 21,925 places in our UK rank which is a considerable difference compared to this semester.

There are likely several reasons for this gap in figures. The first is the way in which social media was used compared to previous semesters. In previous semesters, the reporters and social media editor kept up a more consistent presence on site such as Facebook and Twitter and articles were shared with groups with a specific interest in them through these sites. Whilst this did happen to some extent this semester, it was not as frequent and largely began to happen towards the end of our time on WINOL, meaning it had a greatly reduced impact on the viewing figures partly as no trust had been built up between the groups and the WINOL team but also because Alexa averages views over 3 months, the poorer figures from previous weeks skew the rank negatively making it look as though the impact of introducing new ideas and techniques is less effective than it actually is. The other key social media aspect that was overlooked at the beginning of the semester is the email reminders sent to everyone within the university on a Wednesday to advertise the bulletin. By picking this up quite late in the semester it suffered similar problems to the lack of sharing articles to relevant groups on social media sites. This is not to say, however, that the use of social media has had no impact on the viewing figures on the news site. According to slim stat, a word press plug in for viewing figures and analysis, Twitter and Facebook combined account for 2.66% of our viewing figures.

We have also tried to use advertising on the university screens and competitions to improve figures however, the contests were not really kept up throughout the semester and were not particularly well advertised. Whilst there is no specific way of measuring the impact from the advertising screens, the number of views since it was implemented seems to have improved, suggesting that it has helped improve the awareness of WINOL on campus.

Another reason that the viewing figures are not as high as before is that we do not seem to update the site as regularly. Whilst before, we have had rotas to ensure content is uploaded over the weekend, this has not come into fruition this year. Partly, this is due to the inconsistency of News Editor each week as well as the lack of volunteers or interested reporters. Since we have had a front page editor, the site has been much fresher and content has come in earlier and even over the weekend but this wasn’t until the last few weeks of the semester so, again, has seen little impact on the Alexa rank however, the success can be seen in some of the viewing figures on slim stat.

The other major thing that could have had an effect on the figures is the disparity in quality and timing of articles and bulletins. Whilst the production of the bulletins has been good and improved by the use of a new vision mixer and green screen image for the background, due to various technical issues, the bulletin has been late most weeks. To help this, I feel the News Editor needs a clearer image of what they want in the bulletin earlier which would be easier if we had one News Editor rather than a rota as well as getting our reporters to plan their articles more in advance and stick to deadlines better. By using more contact lead stories, reporters could get better stories and scoop other local news sources which would not only improve the quality of the bulletin and our viewing figures but also make the News Editor’s job a lot easier.

A problem that we had a lot, especially at the beginning of the year, was over exposure and poor white balancing and framing in packages, especially with PTCs (pieces to camera) which is likely to be, in part, due to both inexperience and the fact that, as VJs (video journalists) it is difficult to focus, etc. your camera when you are stood in front of it as you cannot adjust the settings on the camera remotely and so have to move to change it. However, as our audience would not know this, they would only notice that the video looked strange and therefore feel it was not as professional as it should be which could make them feel that we are not as trustworthy as other news organisations. Over time, the quality of packages did improve but it is possible that we lost some of our audience members at the beginning as they were not impressed with our work.

There have also been a lot of inconsistencies in the quality of written work which has, largely, been much improved by our team of subs however, the amount of work they put into fixing these stories is far greater than it should be; they should be there to fix minor grammatical and layout issues rather than to completely alter the story which, especially in the first few months, they frequently had to do. This impacted on the amount of time the subs had to work on features and how quickly text stories went on the site which could also have impacted on the overall viewing figures as our site would seem outdated as the latest news was slow to appear.

This semester, we launched a weekly entertainment bulletin which has proven quite popular with our audience. It has improved in quality over the weeks but could be better still with greater planning as often the team doesn’t know what sort of things they are going to film until a few days before it goes out and occasionally end up with a lack of packages due to this. However, it has been an important feather in our cap and has increased our audience. Unlike our news bulletin, Access Winchester knows exactly what its audience is and appeals directly to it; by gaining a better understanding of our audience and defining it either as a student or local news site, WINOL news could further increase its audience as our entertainment bulletin has.

The features site has been dramatically altered and improved over the course of the semester and whilst it now looks good, the continuous changes could well have impacted on the overall figures for the site. Previously, the features have helped make the site ‘sticky’ as well as actually bringing more people to the site either by making them aware of the news site through links on the site or by inter-promoting through social media.

However, the new integrated site makes the features look a lot more professional and regularly updated and has good viewing figures according to slim stat though could have done better still if the content was moved over quicker, the site was re-launched properly and it was updated more frequently. It would probably also have helped if the changes had not come into effect part way through the semester as this sudden change in layout may have confused our viewers. Overall however, I feel the features site is running much smoother both due to the new site and the way we now hold features meetings which is now a lot closer to the way the news conferences work. This improvement is reflected in the statistics for the site, with viewing peaks of 559 in one day and an average weekly reach of around 854 viewers since the re-launch according to slim stat.

Like features, sport is usually a big draw for the site. Although this is still true this year, with it being the 2^nd most popular category according to slim stat, the Sports Week news bulletin viewing figures seem to be down compared to previous years. This may be partly due to the lack of niche sport coverage. In previous years, we have covered more unusual sports such as ice hockey which has meant that people with an interest in more unusual sports have tended to flock to our bulletin. However, we have been unable to cover ice hockey but have not found another sport to replace it nor have we been covering the university teams which would draw a new audience with an interest either in a niche or in the university which would appeal to our student demographic.

As the Editor this semester, I have been trying to improve all aspects of WINOL, co-ordinating the editors and attempt to increase the circulation of the site. Over my time in this role, I have developed my communication and leadership skills as well as learning even more about how a newsroom works for all the various members of staff and attempted to use this knowledge to make the various processes involved in WINOL easier and more efficient. This has been quite difficult as we are all at an equal level in that we are all students, it has been difficult to assert authority when it is needed and to effectively be in a position of authority as I have no real power. I have also tried to fix some of the serious issues the team has had with communication. In the beginning, things such as changes to running order or production were not effectively communicated between news editor and head of production but by stressing the importance of this in debriefs it has gradually improved over the semester as have things such as production values in packages, the use of social media and SEO checking articles. I also tried to increase the circulation by suggesting that the features sites ran competitions and to get the bulletin advertised both around campus and elsewhere. The competitions were not as successful as hoped but this may be due to a lack of advertising outside of the magazine’s social media. Whilst our managing editor did manage to get the news site advertised on the screens around the campus, we were unable to find a way of streaming the bulletin on these which we felt would dramatically increase awareness. I also took the decision to group the features content all together in one new site after gathering the support of the various magazine teams which has been relatively successful so far.

Overall, I feel the team has worked well and the site shows this but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Whilst better circulation can be attained by better use of SEO checks, social media and more advertising, the quality and frequency of uploads needs to improve for us to be able to retain viewers’ attention and build a loyal audience.