Radio planning

Yesterday's session was held at the Ujima radio studios where most of the 3 hours was taken up with discussing content and planning the schedule for the radio show that the team will be delivering on May 9th.  However, as you can see from the previous post (and more photos below), the journalists did get a taster of live broadcasting for a 7 minute slot - little warning for them but they all responded really well, with Roger Griffith providing an outline of the project, David Goldblatt explaining the citizen journalism aspect and some of the participants talking about why they'd decided to join up.

Back round the table, Roger outlined the elements that make up most of Ujima's radio programmes, then through discussion with the team and David, each element was explained and expanded and topics for inclusion were vigorously debated - these include the appointment of Bristol's first Muslim mayor, the forthcoming local council elections and how the newly elected mayor and PCC are dealing with policing, transport and economic development and regeneration. How much of the show would be pre-recorded, what subjects would provide good vox pops material and who would be ideal to have as live guests on the show were also part of the conversation.

The result of all the talking was a good collection of potential material but further editing and refinement will be needed over the next few weeks, possible guest speakers must be contacted and decisions made about whether to do more than one programme. Parallel tasks will see each team member researching their selected topics and devising interview questions for a visit to University of Bristol academics with an interest in these fields.

During the course of the session each participant worked on a 'programme clock' (a pie-chart diagram of the radio show) with frequent amendments, additions and deletions along the way. But at the end of the session, with a growing sense of enthusiasm everyone had achieved a 'work in progress' clock chart and for many of the participants a much better understanding of how a radio programme is put together. One of the team said -

"This is my first time [planning a radio show] - it's a … challenge for me, a good challenge. I'm thinking it's something I can go forward to study, I really enjoyed it. I hope that by the end of it I will gain a lot of experience which will really help me as well to build up my own confidence…. I'm kind of shy but I think with this it's going to bring me out of my shell!" 

First time in the studio for the Citizen Journalism team at Ujima Radio.

The 'mayor' and 'PCC' get a grilling from the trainee journalists

'Sue Mountstevens' and 'Mayor George Ferguson' get a grilling from the team

The highlight of the second session of MayorWatch part 2 on Tuesday was having some allegedly high profile 'guests' at our venue for the day, the Pervasive Media Studio, who agreed to be be subjected to questioning about their actions by our citizen journalist team. The 'guests' were actually our own David Goldblatt and Paul Hassan who took on the remarkably convincing roles of respectively George Ferguson, Bristol's first elected Mayor (without the trademark red trousers), and Sue Mountstevens, the Police Crime Commissioner (PCC) elected at the same time as the Mayor.

This interview session took place after our participants learned how to effectively track down useful sources of information on the internet about their subjects, assess what they found and begin to find topics that they felt needed some fleshing out by the 'Mayor' and the 'PCC'. This research and the subsequent development of useable interview questions was guided by David Goldblatt and Paul Hassan (before they transformed!) and Roger Griffith who also conducted the interview process. Roger invited the interviewers to ask their questions, the 'guests' would reply and the journalists would then come back with a second question - something that they had prepared but that should also respond to points made by the guests. During the debate Roger would ask the journalists to pause at certain points and think whether they'd been given the information they's asked for, consider asking the questions in a different way, and remind them to keep focused. 

This procedure provided some very valuable insights into the successes and weaknesses of the interviews so the trainee journalists began to see how they could approach a topic from a different angle; should only contest a statement by their interviewee if it can backed up by appropriate statistics or facts; ask carefully focused questions that could deter interviewees from providing generic information, and keep on track with their responses. The group learned that active listening is as crucial a part of interviewing as asking the questions. 

Next week's session will be at Ujima Radio where the young journalists will begin to plan their radio programme and have some technical training in the studio. We'll also introduce them to using Twitter (we're @BSmayorwatch) and prepare some content for the forthcoming blog.

Each participant told us at least one thing they'd learnt in the session:

Transcript:

• How to ask effective questions
• I learnt more in depth about what's going on around me, I didn't really know much about the police crime commissioner and that but I learnt quite a bit in the research and look forward to doing some more research into it.
• What plans are actually going towards transport and what the Mayor is planning to do about it
• I've learnt about the environment - transport, the buses, cycling 
• Research - being able to fact-find as opposed to just having your own theories, I guess it's empowering tools to know what people are saying, what they're doing, what's written out - documents.
• I learnt about the Bristol Enterprise Zone, and the Bristol Green Capital and the Bristol Pound. And I learnt about active listening and also different interview techniques and how to better interview the interviewee.