Goooooooooood Morning Merchiston!

The title here may be a little misleading right now, I should say that I haven't been broadcasting to military forces in the southside of Edinburgh, nor have I ever been Robin Williams, but I did get my first taste of being a radio presenter yesterday. As a final flourish of the radio portion of my broadcast module we had a news day - get stories in off the wires*, make them into broadcastable copy**, create packages*** and then put it all together into a news bulletin live as if it were being broadcast (sadly, or fortunatly depending on your point of view, Napier university doesn't have a licence to broadcast radio). In my great tradition of making things hard for myself, I volunteered to present this.

To be honest, the experience wasn't terrible, and I only made one major error (I forgot to turn my interviewee's mic on when I was asking him questions) and people said I did a good job, which was odd for me, since I have never really liked the way my voice sounds. Despite this adequate performance, I felt totally exhausted afterwards, it had been a long day anyway, but when you areading out the news as if it were live on air, and your teacher is sitting across from you, smiling ever so slightly, as well as having your elected editor next to you diving occasional direction, you begin to feel like you're running through traffic.

That was the practice run however, I am taking my first foray into actual real-life proper grown-up radio broadcasting on Wednesday, or perhaps next Wednesday, and will be reading the news out on Leith FM community radio. It kind of helps that the station is small, so things will seem relatively relaxed, but I am just hoping I don't fuck it up somehow.

Anywho, those are the major updates in my life right now, I hope you are all as enthralled as you so rightly should be.

Peace, love and understudies,

Gabe


*Wires: noun - an ingenius device for getting a list of news agency stories in a list online, thus cutting out the need for any journalistic ability whatsoever.

** Copy: noun - the brave and hopeful attempt at writing which journalists engage in before it gets handed to the editor, after which it becomes News.

*** Packages: noun - the clever manipulation of sounds or images in such a way as to make the journalist speaking look like they a) have done the implied legwork and b) know what they are talking about.