15 May Interactive Role: Editorial Assistant
Editorial assistants provide support at all stages of the production process for live shows.
For my role I have chosen the job of editorial assistant as this was the role that I enjoyed the most.
During each week I would aid in the production of the liveshow together with the editor. The role would usually begin immediately after the live show. I would work alongside the editor to talk to each beat about what they would produce for both the radio and live show. This was perhaps one of the most important roles because we had to be fully up to date on what content we would be receiving, but also, we had to keep the pressure on each beat so they would definitely deliver content.
The day before the live stream and the day of the live stream were both the most difficult days. It would involve a lot of collaboration with each team, making sure that the content packages were the right length, the correct format, and ideal content to be put out. From this we should then work on the online management system Inception. We would use this to create scripts for the presenters based on the packages we had received. This stage required a lot of collaboration with the presenters – changing the word order or rewriting a sentence to suit their voice.
The entire show had to be 15 minutes long, which meant that we were constantly working to keep it on time. Some days, there would be too much content, and we would have to review what had been submitted and decide which pieces we could cut from the show. This was also a difficult part of the job and required a lot of interpersonal skills due to the nature of letting whoever made the content, know that theirs hadn’t been picked for broadcast this week.
My daily duties would normally be:
- Note taking during morning briefs
- Chasing team leaders down from different beats to ensure content was on track/and or received by the deadline.
- Working on Inception to write and amend scripts.
- Making editorial decisions on strong and weak content.
- Updating the editor on developments from various beats.
