Week 7: WINOL & The Justice Gap

This week sparked a huge thought process for me, after Claudia Murg's visit to the newsroom I've been left thinking about where I want to go within journalism and when she asked me what my plans are, I couldn't answer her. The truth is, I'm not certain what journey I may follow, all I know is that I am going to try grab every opportunity I can with both hands, experiment, take risks, challenge myself and just see where it is that my strengths lie, and who it is along the way that I may meet. Journalism is an exciting world, it opens so many doors, it's an adventure that leads you into new realms each and every day, but you really do have to live, eat and breathe it, it's an obsession and it does become your life. It's difficult to switch off, if you disconnect yourself from the world, you've missed out, but then there are always the unexpected moments where you do turn away, and these are the times you find yourself talking to someone who has an interesting story to share. There would be no journalism without people, the subject matter is always about who is affected.

I organised an interview with Winchester Prison Governor this week for a feature interview, immediately there was problems with getting access into the prison due to health and safety regulations but a mistake I made was to not go for the next best thing and film outside. Instead he came and joined us in our WINOL studio, but there always seems to be technical problems with the studio, which meant the edit was certainly a challenge. The interview itself went well, but visually for the bulletin it was lacking pictures, we needed to see pictures of the jail to illustrate the story so that was one element missing.  When it came to deciding which part of the interview to use for the bulletin, I must admit I went with the safe option of reporting on the improvements of the prison as this had already been covered by other regional channels. As Claudia said you need to always be bringing something new, it's not journalism if someone else has already done it, which is why on reflection I feel I didn't push the story on. Click the heading to view it online:

Governor ‘confident’ Winchester prison is improving

Having said this, I also did an extended version that did bring something new and fresh to lead with. A new working regime will be implemented into prisons at the start of this week, and therefore it has been posted up online just in time for the weekend.It also covered the debate over whether prisons should be places of rehabilitation or punishment, following on from the previous article I wrote about re-offending rates in prisons. It was really interesting to hear from a Governor's point of view whether they believe prisoners have equal human rights to us. The editor thought the interview worked really well, it had depth and substance, and it was different to a news report. To read and watch the video interview click the heading below.

New prison regime gets prisoners to work

This is an example of how a story has been found through speaking to contacts, it's before any press releases have been released, and before any other paper has covered it. A note from the debrief last week is that we need to be leading with a new story at the start of the week on the WINOL website, as too often stories have not been updated from the previous Wednesday. There is always a spike in traffic mid-week but then this dips over the weekend when there are no new stories uploaded. I have filed this article as a draft ahead of Monday morning, so that there is some fresh news to start the week.