GENERAL ELECTION TRIUMPH

Our general election coverage was a complete triumph. Will be reporting on this in detail in the near future. We are now editing a highlights package with a full roll of credits at the end. In the meantime it would be a good idea to post your packages up on your own blogs and also to on to the WINOLNEWS you tube channel. Well done everyone.

On a night of so many impressive performances it is invidious to name individuals, nevertheless - Stu and Andy were reporters on the spot and their announcements of the the result beat the BBC. That was a 'champagne moment' but only made possible by the whole team effort.

Kayleigh did a fantastic job with the nightmare of the Outside Broadcasts. Becky was thrown on to the screen with about 10 minutes notice to do a paper review. The newsroom reporting team of Grant, Joey,Josh and James gave reports of real authority which kept the show moving forward. I was helping with the scripts at first but I went into a sort of catatonic trance about 3am and they took over and freestyled it with remarkable aplomb. Tom was absolutely superb as the summarizer - easily as good as any of the mainstream journos in the same role - and all that with no million pound computer graphics to support him (in fact with exactly NO graphics at all!).

I was not in the studio and gallery (Brian and Paul were there as tutors) - but clearly that went very well indeed - the output did not falter and when I was in there on some mission or other it was a model of efficiency, calm assertiveness, focus and teamwork. Graham Bell - well what can you say. It is no wonder that Sky like him so much and he is clearly destined for great things. And yet I remember him when he was a shy, quiet, unconfident undergraduate.... (not!).

In fact he seems to have calmed down a bit. It was a hard act to follow, but Claire was fantastic (given she had no script and she arrived just at the moment when the news situation was ultra-confusing and the OBs were collapsing and/or panicking and/or confused all over the shop). Claire in fact was the only the person to get live fan mail on the audience chat line. Luke Garrett turns out to be a natural on camera on what was in a way a sort of elaborate screen test. WINOL team need to sign him up - star quality.

First year volunteers did a great job as well in a variety of roles, and that should set you all up in good stead for next year when you start getting involved with live output as part of your course. The Tricaster was another start - thanks to the fantastic development and preparation work of Brian and Paul. This kit means we can easily do live streaming broadcasts with multicamera from all sorts of places - football matches, conferences... all sorts.

We have to thank Brian for pushing to have it live (I wanted to do an 'as live' because I reckoned we would get only a few minutes of decent output through the whole night. Brian was absolutely right, and I was wrong. Paul too pushed to make it more ambitious and in so doing he solved a whole range of technical problems that cropped up. Paul brought in Graham as well.

As a team you completely outshone Kingston University who were, so far as I was aware, the only other student operation that was trying to cover the election live. The boys and girls at Kingston are no slouches - they are MA students (some with first class BA degrees from Oxford and Cambridge and what have you) and they are on an NCTJ news reporting course (which means they study news and only news all the time - not distracted by learning camerawork or video editing and what have you - all they have to do effectively is write scripts). The Kingston team di brilliantly well on the team - but I think you did far better still. Their operation collapsed at about 2am and their plan to bring out a newspaper (printed at 4am - which was roughly their equivalent of our live output) simply did not happen, which was a shame.

Buckingham and Austria did great work for us and this is something we want to develop. The problem was that the level you lot are working at is so far ahead of Buckingham (where they are BA students, not MA) it was just a problem using the work they were producing in any way at all. We had talks with one or two other unis, but in the end they were not able to put a single reporter in the field on the night. That means when you go for those jobs you can be sure that - whatever the situation in terms of old school tie - you will have been involved in the actuality of producing journalism to a far, far greater extent and at a much better level than any other students in the country.

So everyone - without exception - involved in the project did a great job, even if things fell through. We have all learned an immense lot from this. And so when the next general election comes along (any day now - given the instability of either the Conservative-DUP alliance or the Labour-Liberal-SNP-Green Rainbow Alliance or anything in between) we will be able to do it even better.