What a week!
Greetings. Forgive my absence. Just got back from Ballarat yesterday for my week of work placement with the WIN TV News team, organised through RMIT for my post-graduate diploma in journalism. In summary… awesome.
Allow me to start from the beginning…
Last Sunday, after buying two new ties suitable for television, I left Melbourne for Ballarat on a $7 V-line train ticket…
On the train ride I spent most of the journey chatting with a very nice lady named Dona, a resident of Ballarat, about various topics related to our respected lives. When we arrived in Ballarat she very generously let me ride in her taxi to my motel. She gave me her card and told me to call her later in the week to “catch up”. Nice town so far!
The motel that was to be my home for the next 6 days was the Ballarat Mid-City Motor Inn:
The support beams covered in gold tiles, brown-themed interior, bubble-shaped furniture and choice of font gives the place a 1960s Vegas feel, which I for one very much enjoyed…
On Sunday night I seemed to be the only person staying there, so I had the buffet breakfast the next morning all to myself, which highlighted another problem with travelling alone: being forced to take my own pictures of myself, which after a while does become tedious:
I tried walking to the WIN TV station on the first day but turns out it’s 3km… It looked a lot closer on Google Maps…
I considered hiring a car but it would cost $200, plus a $200 deposit, and the only place I found that would rent a car to someone under 25 operated on a “cash only” basis.
I woke up Monday morning intending to do it, but on my way there I came to the conclusion I couldn’t be bothered, so just caught taxis to the TV station and bummed a lift back to town from a different reporter every day.
And thus I arrived at WIN.
WIN TV is Australia’s largest commercial television network, and has one of the largest broadcast areas of any TV network in the world. However, due to the low population density of regional Australia, their maximum theoretical viewership is about 5 million.
Forgive the bad reflection on this diagram (Tasmania should be completely blue)…
So, first day with the WIN News team: tiring. It had been a long time since I’d worked a full day. By about 2:30 I was just about falling asleep! Plus there was a lot of information to take in. And I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be doing…
I tagged along with reporter Nathan Tanti and camera-man Matt McKinley while they did a few interviews and got some vision for the evening’s bulletin.
As the week went on I tagged along with all of the Ballarat reporters at least once. They work very hard out in the country. The reporters generally do two stories everyday. The capital city reporters for Nine, Seven, Ten, etc. have the luxury of only having to do one, generally.
So I got out and about sitting in the back of the white WIN News four-wheel-drives. I got to see a lot of Ballarat and the surrounding areas, which was pretty cool…
Plus I didn’t have to pay to get into Sovereign Hill!
Ballarat is the central WIN News station for all of Victoria. Every weekday, Ballarat coordinates six local news bulletins for Victoria’s six regional markets: Bendigo, Albury, Shepparton, Mildura, Traralgon and of course, Ballarat, which has the studio facilities:
That means that anchorman Bruce Roberts reads six pre-recorded news bulletins a day. That’s 30 news bulletins a week!
Bruce is a class act. Fantastic voice and delivery. Cares deeply about the news. And the nicest guy in the world. I watched him read the news “live” in the studio:
And then again on my motel TV:
Except for Friday, when acting news director Jeff Sly filled in…
Jeff’s got a great voice too. In fact, I was very impressed with the professionalism of everyone at WIN News. The journalists and camera guys, the guys in the control rooms, were all just fantastic. Great people and a pleasure to work with.
And they make a quality product. It’s the only local television news service in regional Victoria. Not even the ABC does that…
By about Wednesday I was feeling a bit more confident and got my head around the ENPS news software they use at WIN (industry standard, apparently). I started writing news briefs for the bulletin – short 15 second summaries to be read out during the “regional round-up” section of the news.
It was pretty cool writing stuff and then seeing Bruce read it on the air!
Then on Thursday the highlight of the week occurred. I accompanied Nathan Tanti to the Ballarat court. There were two cases on in different courts at the same time, so he covered the more important one in the County Court and I sat in on the one in the Magistrate’s Court.
My guy got bail, and very quickly left the dock and walked out. We weren’t really prepared for this and didn’t have a camera guy with us. Nathan was still in the other court, so I called Jonothan “Jono” Kendall at the news desk and he sent a camera down. Dan arrived just in time to get some vision of the guy leaving the court with his family. Bang! We had a television news story!
Got back to the office and I wrote a 30 second RVO (Reader Voice Over) story to go with the footage. Bruce read it out on the news that night!It was an exhilarating feeling. Probably the greatest moment in my journalism career up to this moment…
Later in the week I also caught up with Dona from the train. She runs a bar called “Portico” on Dana Street. She very generously invited me along to a friendly get-together with some of her friends and family. There’s nothing like travelling alone to force you to talk to total strangers.
I also ate dinner in an Indian restaurant with a gentleman named Karl, who would also have otherwise dined alone. Very good company.
On Friday night I also briefly hung out with some drunk girls staying in another room at the motel. That was all right for a laff… and a couple of photos…
And that just about wrapped it up.
Bit slow to start with but by the end of the week I was sourcing stories and writing them and they were actually going to air. I voiced a few packaged stories as well just for my showreel. They were a bit understaffed this week with a few people on holiday, so they didn’t have time to edit any of my unnecessary extra work. Hopefully I’ll get a DVD in the mail this week.
I caught a train back across the plain in the rain, as I took vain self-portrait photos:
But yes, television news is something I very much enjoyed, and if last week’s experience has taught me nothing else, it’s that I can do it, and I like it.
Thank you very much to the good people at WIN TV Ballarat for showing me the intricacies of their industry, and to Mandy Crane at RMIT for setting it all up for me, and of course to my Mother for paying for the motel room.
Now I’m back in Melbourne. The search for full time work in broadcast continues…
Kind regards,
David M. Green
WIN News… just for the week.
