For a news story to appeal to an audience, it must be relevant to them, in that they will want to know how this story affects their demographic as well as hear from the people affected, but also relevant in that it has some sort of an impact on them, whether the story stirs their emotions, or encourages them to change something in their life. It must be immediate and fresh to do this, showing the audience something they've never seen, or something they know from a different angle (Boyd, Stewart, and Alexander, 2008:16-17).
Therefore, I sourced many of my own ideas from newspapers, focusing on topics which are relevant now, such as current and upcoming events, as well as will be accessible to wide audiences such as technology, challenges with farming, and wellbeing.
Technology and Wellbeing idea:
The reason I decided to pick this idea is that I thought it could have 'a lesson or moral to the story, or maybe it just teaches us something we didn’t know enough about' (Kobré, 2013:35), since from looking at newspaper articles I saw that there are many questions people are still trying to answer about technology in regards to advantages and disadvantages to the publics' wellbeing.For example:
-Can video games lead to violence? Do they have this much impact on peoples' dispositions?
-Do many sit for too long? Especially since many jobs and hobbies revolve around and are increasingly depending upon technology (desk jobs in offices in particular)
-Do people have a healthy relationship to social media and their phones? Could mindfulness help those who are miserable because of social media, or should they take breaks from or even stay away from these platforms for good?
-Can technology be beneficial because it brings people together? Does this outweigh the disadvantages, even if only for some people?
Possible Characters
-A gamer who is addicted to (or plays a lot of) one person shooter games; an investigation could be led into whether they appear to veer towards more violent media because they have been desensitised by the games-Office workers; a report could be filmed on how many hours these workers sit for, whether they have noticed any negative impacts on their health because of sitting (back/neck pain), and what they could do to prevent this pain and improve their health; expert in this area could be a doctor or physiotherapist
-Bloggers/social media experts; could have a live interview with Suzi Grant, a beauty blogger from Brighton who is 68 and uses her platform on the internet to preach positive values about why it is important to take care of yourself at all ages (blog: alternate ageing); or a mindfulness expert who could inform the audience about the benefits of mindfulness in combating technology induced misery
-An artist or video creator could tell us how they use technology as a platform to express themselves and share their work with a wider audience than would be possible if they didn't share content online (sourced through The Kent Artists Group?)
-A gaming community/club could share their views on violent video games, and tell us how technology has brought them together, and impacted their lives positively and/or negatively (could talk to customers and staff at AllGen gaming in Rochester)
-A family, or older people who use the Internet to connect with each other; how this bridges the generation gap and brings them together when they are apart; could experiment to see how a family got on with using FaceTime to communicate or using devices to have a virtual family game night, rather than playing board games
References:
Boyd, A., Stewart, P., and Alexander, R. (2008) Broadcast Journalism : Techniques of Radio and Television News. (6th ed.) Oxon: Focal Press.
Kobré, K. (2013) Videojournalism : Multimedia Storytelling. Oxon: Focal Press.
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