Reflective Report on Radio Production
The podcast that I was a part of is “G-Cast News” I thought that our podcast adhered quite well to the Agency document and to my personal philosophy. As stated in my personal philosophy, there is no such thing as pure objectivity. The stories that were covered in our podcast could have had one or two more voices in the packages to objectify them a bit more, but otherwise I believe that there was a fair amount of objectivity.
In terms of the aims of the Agency Document:
• Responsibility
• Professionalism
• Accuracy
• Fairness
• Thorough research
• Sensitivity
I believe that we achieved this to a certain extent. The story that I covered was the water crisis in Grahamstown. We interviewed a pharmacist, she knew enough to provide us with a story, but we could have interviewed somebody like a scientist who knew more about the water conditions. We took the angle of how it affects people, and is the water shortage causing dehydration in the town. This is where the pharmacist could help us.
We executed the interview and package in a professional way. The levels could have been adjusted slightly, as they varied at times (throughout the whole podcast).
The facts covered in the packages, to my knowledge are accurate. One problem in the final mixdown of the water shortage package was that we edited a sentence out that we thought to be unnecessary, but when listening to the whole podcasts I could see that it is necessary. The sentence is that dehydration is caused by vomiting and diarrhea and not by a lack of water. The sentence we edited out was that the quantity of the water is the problem, it is the quality. This caused some confusion when listening to the package.
I think that we were fair in our packages. In the story about the strikes, there was a voice saying that the strikes were justified. There was no voice of one of the strikers, so it was not as fair as it could have been, but it was not totally one sided.
In all our packages we could have researched a bit more thoroughly, but I do not feel that any of the stories were not badly researched.
I do not think that any of our stories were insensitive, and that they were done well in terms of sensitivity. They were not obviously completely sensitive, but they were not insensitive.
