Term 2 Commences

After an intensely productive and, as expressed in previous blog entries, occasionally problematic first term, we enter second term, the term where all our hard work comes together in the second ever year of Upsrtart on radio. During the first term I familiarized myself with the six Upstarters. I discovered the type of personalities they have and thus the qualities that they can bring to the show. The two anchors for instance, Aphiwe and Reggie, combine presentation qualities with personality to bring together a potentially fantastic combination. Then there are the hard workers Aviwe and Xabiso, where one gets excited about the prospect of doing homework, and the other is always heavily immersed in the project and is keen to learn.

I feel that the workshops we have had over the past six weeks have been highly productive in enabling the Upstarters to acquire the necessary skills to conduct, record and edit interviews. The way they present and articulate themselves on air has also been worked on, and we Refilwe and I will continue to work on this with them in second term.

So with the comfort of knowing that this has been a success, we get to the crux of how our term two plans will come together. As discussed in the previous blog entry, we formulated as a group the content that should be produced. This is still very much a work in progress. The content plans are still very much on surface level, but what we have established is the format, the structure, and our aims for the target audience. The format and structure is outlined in our term 2 plans, which you can view on the home page of this site. Our aim is to provide informative content that is also entertaining. As can be seen in my personal philosophy, this is something I aim for in particular. The Upstart group as a whole though, also expressed the importance of this. The appropriateness is emphasized by the fact that the Upstarters are essentially the target audience- they represent the high school kids who will listen to the shows. So when we establish the exact content that we wish to cover, we will bear this in mind.

At the beginning of first term I did a paragraph on social research and paradigms of thinking, where I explained the paradigm of thinking that I believe in, and the one that I believe will lend well to the way in which we produce our content. The interpretive approach still seems to be an apt way to centre on our approach. I consider subjectivity to be of great importance when reporting, as it encourages debate and discussion, which, instead of just raw facts, is a very important source of information for stories. I hope the stories that the Upstarters will produce will encourage debate, and the way the show is structured will facilitate discussion, because I believe this will lend well towards a compelling show that sparks arguments, and with this comes entertainment, because I think I can speak in general when I say that people will be more drawn to topics and features when they ‘heat up’ and challenge the audience to question both sides of the argument.

In summary, only once we have fully established the content that we will produce, can we feel that we are moving towards a successful show. I think however, that we are moving in the right direction- I know who my Upstarters are, and I know what each Upstarter can bring to the plate. They are familiar with crucial audio skills, and we have a solid foundation in place, as articulated in our term 2 plans, which we can work from this term to indeed make it a success.