This document discusses how a local news bulletin uses, develops, and challenges conventions of real local news broadcasts. It describes including vox pops to engage audiences, conducting an interview on education, using music to introduce topics and set tones, challenging conventions by transitioning between stories without breaks, and opening the broadcast with an identification of the show, presenter, time and jingle. Examples of each convention used in the bulletin are provided.

1. How does your LOCAL NEWS
BULLETIN use, develop or challenge
the forms and conventions of real
local news bulletins?

2. Using Codes and
Conventions to construct
our News Bulletin
Click on the icon above to hear
our link into the news bulletin.
Radio is a continuous medium in
which the presenters have to
provide continuity – too much
‘dead air’ is not permissible
otherwise the radio station would
lose their audience.
Although the completed bulletin is
a continuous FIVE minutes of audio
it is constructed from different
‘episodes’ with the total piece. In
this example Latoya to handing
back to me in the studio. By
speaking in this way we are making
this clear to the listening audience

3. Meeting the Brief with a
Vox pop
Vox Pops are recordings that are taken from a group of people so we can hear
and highlight their thoughts of the question, that we have asked them. While
doing our research on the codes and conventions on our show, we established
that none of the local radio shows we've looked at didn’t have any Vox Pops.
This meant that there was an opportunity for us to use this code and convention
as it could challenge the other local radio news bulletins into the audience being
engaged with a code and convention they have never heard before.
Here is the Vox Pop we created following from the
news item of me asking questions to our local area
on Sadiq Khan becoming London Mayor

4. Interviews• When reporting a story, we found out that interviews are generally used when it
comes to serious news or when it has some influence on the local area. An
example of this, is when we decided to use an interview with John Barry, who is
the Local Councilor for St John’s Wood Ward about how our local area would
benefit for children to attend schools there.
• We felt that using an interview about a serious issue like children’s future with
education would make the news item more appealing towards parents. This is
because it will effect their children, which will make them eager to listen to what
we have to say. Furthermore, it will reassure them that the quality of their child’s
education will be the best if they attend one of the schools in St John’s Wood.
Here is our first news item, which talks about
our first news item about the value of
Education.

5. Music
• We used Garage Band (music creation software) and
www.freesound.org to create title music as an intro into
our five minute radio news bulletin. Additionally we used
music to introduce new topics within our radio news
bulletin as well as notifying the reader on the tone of the
news item.
• Examples of music within our bulletin:
Entertainment
Health
These two examples show how we have used
music within our bulletin.

6. Challenge Codes and
Conventions
• When researching other local radio shows, none of them had sound
effects and transitions. To challenge other local news bulletins we
thought we should go from one news item to another news item without
any breaks.
• An example of a transition is our second news item (Employment)
jumping straight into the third news item (Entertainment):
• I believe that transitions in our news bulletin and sound effects is
effective as I can show my creativeness and ability towards using
audacity.
Transition from news
item to news 3

7. Start of show
• In the start of the show we used a transition from
continuity announcer to our presenter. This matters as
there is a radio identification being used. This includes
saying the name of the show, name of presenter, time,
jingle and jumping into our first news item which was
Education.
• Here is an example of our radio identification:
Continuity
announcer
Presenter
(Me) Jingle
I believe this is effective because we were able to
quote the presenter using radio identification as
we are supposed to give the public of our local
area a reliable and accurate news.

8. THE END