Week 3
After spending the weekend exploring Cambridge, Sunday saw my first visit to the BBC Cambridgeshire studio for our live show. I was expecting a dark underground room, but it's a nice airy studio and we'd filled it with lots of guests for our Q & A show. I had a lot of fun updating the twitter account with the answers our panel were giving to the varied questions sent in by our audience.
Another Monday, and another collection of interesting news from around the globe to choose from. Alongside publishing online some of the news pieces from last week, I arranged to talk to one researcher in Canada and another in the USA. Both were great, and by the end of Monday I’d arranged interviews for both Chris and myself.
An addition to a normal Monday was a request from BBC Cambridgeshire for a Naked Scientist to talk about a news story on their drivetime programme at 5:45. As is becoming usual, I volunteered! Graihagh and I chose a research paper that had come out that day on a research project that studied the UK Biobank data to see if there was a genetic influence on lung health and its relationship with smoking. It was a really interesting paper, and I had about an hour to prepare to talk about it on live radio! I felt much more prepared for this much shorter slot than for last week’s phone in, so it went much better. (Or at least that’s what I was told!)
On Tuesday I managed to get my interview done, although had some real challenges with the studio connections. I ended up chatting to him for quite a while, which I knew would make my editing job harder! I then went to the #Camscicomm social, and met some more locals interetsed in science communication.
After Wednesday’s meeting. I attacked the edit and managed to get it down to the right time. I then put some time into starting to plan my show.
As interns, we’re given the opportunity to produce one show on our own. This means we can choose the topic for the back end, as well as being in charge of collating any news stories for that week.
I had originally wanted to plan my show around renewable energy, but once I had mentioned my work with POST last year on big data, everyone seemed to get a bit excited. So I got in contact with my supervisor from POST, to ask her for any tips on interviewees.
The main problem is having too many ideas! As usual…
I’d also been put in charge of organising “Question of the Week” for next week, so started looking for appropriate experts who could help answer the question sent in by a listener. If anyone knows the wind speed needed to blow over a lorry then get in touch!
Thursday sees the writing of the news article to accompany the audio news piece, and this week a group lunch to say goodbye to one of the interns. I was particularly restrained and only had 2 pieces of cheesecake…
Friday began by finding out my new piece was in the script for the 5live science show. This was quite exciting! I don't think I'll be listening live at 5am, but definitely one for iplayer.
No comments:
Post a Comment