Four weeks into my postgraduate media course @ the University College in Falmouth I am now facing my first assessment. The task is to “find a news story about an environment issue in Cornwall” and “research, set up and record an interview on the story with a relevant interviewee”.

While the Multimedia Broadcast Journalists (MBJs) have to do this for a BBC Radio Cornwall audience, the International Journalists (IJs) on our course (and I am one of them) have to do so for a BBC World Service audience and find an international angle to the story. Kinda makes sense, right?!

Well, the news story that we are to produce should consist of:

• a studio cue with technical instructions and
• an audio clip
• the final news story must have a total duration of 50 seconds.

Secondly we are asked to produce a longer edited version of our interview which

• includes our questions as well as
• a studio cue with technical instructions
• the total duration of the interview + cue should be 2:45.

Having given the task quite a lot of thought over the last couple of days I am yet to come up with a precise plan of how tackling it…

As always though, it all starts with doing research and gathering information, which is exactly what I will start doing NOW.