Meeting 7

This weeks meeting took place at 4pm at Sparkhouse studios with my editor Daniel Ionescu and reporter Elizabeth Fish.

Just as a note to everyone this meetings take place every Tuesday and usually write the post a few days later

This week the story ideas I pitched was to focus to try and practice my skills at taking a national story and localising it.

1. Ofcom speaker Lawrie Halden- As part of my course a provincial member of Ofcom came to talk about community media. Since The Lincolnite is a community media outlet with a highly specific target geodemographically determined audience his talk on regulation could be relevant. Especially with the Leveson inquiry bringing on debates of the press having a change in regulation. (Interested take a look at my course preparation- http://secondyearuni.blogspot.com/)

2. Local toyshop at Christmas- At the top of the hill theirs a local independent toy store which sells old fashioned toys. So with Christmas coming and with the media reporting on the economic downturn and the change in peoples shopping habits I thought it would be interesting to see what the shop was doing for Christmas.

Though we decided after discussion to not use these ideas but to however focus on upcoming Santa Fun run (http://thelincolnite.co.uk/2011/12/santa-fun-run-will-raise-thousands-for-charity/ ). The brief for this story is to talk to the organiser, speak to runners and get photos of the race. The deadline for the story is Sunday night.

So this week I’d thought I would reflect on regulation. Mainly because of my guest lecture with Ofcom’s Lawrie Holden who talked about self regulation. He discussed the regulations surrounding how community and commercial radio stations go through various regulations and require the following things:

·        Experience- Someone on staff needs to have some training and knowledge of broadcasting

·        Benefit to the community and relevance- It helps the community out in way that strengthens the community and is relevant to people in range of the transmission.

With the Government encouraging platforms like TV to go into a community like format it’s possible that one day that hyper local community websites could be ran by community groups. So the future or a possible endeavour like this relies on some kind regulatory body possibly being created to do monitor them. However this all depends on how the Leveson inquiry impacts on press regulation, something again is a difficult minefield to tackle.