Student Radio Association

NEWSLINK WEEKLY

Every week newslink broadcast a half an hour news programme, for students. What ever story we cover we always made sure that it related to students. Even if the story was a national one we would make sure the way we covered it would appeal to students.

The style of our programme was always chatty, but serious in the relevant parts, as we think that is the best way to maintain students interest in a news programme. Our programmes we well produced with music and effects that made the news stories more entertaining to our audience.

We covered national stories like the protests at the G20 sumit and even international stories like the Gaza Israel conflict but from student angle. We looked at how those big stories had affected students. 

They way we developed and produced each story would vary from week to week and story to story. As often as possible we had a live guest to look further into a particular story or to talk about something, for example in the union. We would cover all union elections and try and get in as many candidates as possible so that students could hear first hand how there union was being run.

After each weeks programme we would decide what story ideas we would pursue for the following week, I would then delegate stories to various people and set deadlines. I think being this organised was very important, it meant we always had enough for the half hour news programme but also had time to cover any new developing stories. We also did updates on any stories that had previously been covered, for example on Meredith Kerchers death and Providence Properties, the letting agency who hadnt been given students their deposit back.

Aswell as live interviews, we would have pre recorded packages, pre recorded interviews, live two ways and illustrated two ways. We tried to vary how the programmes we put together as we did not want the programmes to become repetitive.

However, there were some parts of the programme we kept the same. These were the light hearted parts of the programme, for example we had a quirky story each week, something that was still news but more light hearted. Again this would always be something that would relate to students for example a university making a car out of vegetables, this story slotted in very well when we covered Leeds University's green week. 

In the Sports part of the newslink programme we kept the 'In the Locker room' feature, this is where we chose one sports team and interviewed their captain but asking questions like 'whos the best dancer'?. This was an idea developed last year but we thought it was very succesul so decided to continue to included it this year again. Also with the sport we wanted to cover more of the University teams, so each week a reporter would go to one of the games on a wednesday and have a report for the programme. We also had live coverage of Varsity this year, which is the day of sports events between Leeds University and Leeds Met, and finishs with a rugby match at the Leeds Carnegie stadium with over 1000 spectators. We were very pleased with how the sports coverage had developed this year, and with the coverage of even more student sports.

We were constantly out speaking to people on campus and within the University to find stories, this also meant we rasied our profile so people often came to us with stories. By being out and generally speaking to people meant we were able to find new stories for example the people not eating before nights out. 

In all of the stories we covered we wanted to hear student voices so that is what our audience wanted to hear, but we also had experts in all of our stories for credilbity and quite often to give expert opinions and advice.

Getting people to listen to student radio is a challenge, let alone the news so we always made sure that Newslink was accessible, engaging and relevant to the students of leeds.