University of Sheffield Postgraduate Journalism Production Week

What is Production Week?

For the fourth year in a row, Sheffield journalism postgrads undertook a 'Production Week', during which two newspapers, a website, a magazine and daily radio and TV broadcasts are produced and published (or aired).


Normally, this takes place during the local elections - however, there are none in Sheffield this year, much to my disappointment. It was decided that June 4th, when the European elections are taking place, was too late in the term and therefore, we would cover the news the week beginning Monday 27th April, with the website going 'live' the day after.

I say this because unfortunately, the website is not public facing. This is for two related reasons: namely the use of PA photos, who we have a deal with, and broadcast's use of BBC and Sky bulletins to supplement their national coverage. Licensing agreements don't allow us to actually publish or broadcast his material. I've taken a few screen shots of the website though, and hopefully fellow postgrads on the other courses can put some pictures of their platforms finished results up.

To re-cap, Sheffield Uni. Journalism department has four main courses: Print, Web, Broadcast and Magazine.

The website and working with the courses

Unlike the print group, those of us on the web course rotated roles every day (as did broadcast), meaning I undertook positions as Local News Ed, Reporter (though also did some Features stuff), Home News Ed and lastly Web Editor.

For the first time I believe, we had a 'web first' policy, in which getting news online first was a necessity. However, there was a never a formal structure in place throughout the week and this relied greatly on good communication between the courses. The web team had 2 broadcast students working with us everyday, who ensured that the multimedia content got uploaded.

For the web team, our week mostly consisted of getting content from our own reporters, receiving even more content from print (especially on local news and sport), publishing our own content on national and international stories (mostly re-written from the wires) and making continuous editorial decisions on the layout and priority. We also worked closely with broadcast to get A/V content on the stories.

See below screenshots of the Local News section, and the 'Quirky' News section which we added on Friday:And Quirky:

We managed to cover a wide range of stories, including the minor earthquake in the Lake District which I spotted on Breaking Tweets, the attack on the Dutch Royal family and from the print students, the death of a 19-year old Chinese student in a car accident in Sheffield last Saturday and from print and broadcast, a by-election in East Ecclesfield. In all, with contributions from all the courses, approximately 189 stories were published by the website in 4 days.

A converged production week?

I'm told that in contrast to previous years, this was the most integrated production week we'd had. Largely, this was my experience. We worked with print on a constant basis and they provided us with plenty of copy, especially local. They wanted to save some stories for their editions, especially that which was going on their front page. It's a constant dilemma in multi-platform media, and personally, I would have preferred all content to go on the web first.

But I can perfectly understand holding some things back for a print edition and considering how well we worked together, I can hardly begrudge them! Particular thanks go to Mike Trudeau and Jasmine Coleman, who were always very willing to work with the web (and for asking me to do a comment piece on the East Ecclesfield by-election for the paper).

Broadcast were also very co-operative and were willing to upload their content as soon as it had gone out on their bulletins. They often wrote the stories accompanying their multimedia packages as well. We did get fewer stories from the 'Duck' magazine, which was out at the end of the week. I understand the need to hold back some material for a print edition, but it did leave our Features page looking a little bear at some points - though it was populated by contributions from the paper and web students.

This could also be a problem at the Forge Press - we've recently re-launched our website, and a new team are coming onboard. The roles are now entirely converged - next year's Comment editors are also the Web Comment editors - but a fortnightly production cycle doesn't led itself to instantaneous online publishing. Comissioning articles on a Monday, then having them in by a Friday and publishing them a week later is far away from a web first policy.

As I mentioned, the lack of an overall system by which stories were researched, written and uploaded did lead to a few mishaps. For example, we had a web student and a print student write the same story. But overall, we were getting there and the 'web first' policy was working.

I think we could have done a lot more with the website. We had a Twitter feed, @jusnews, though all the links would have led to a closed site for external users. It would have been good to incorporate a Google Map with locations for the stories, and perhaps inbed video within the stories - something that was considered, but only later on in the week. This is just the tip of the iceberg to what we could have done, but each of us was under a lot of pressure to write, sub and publish stories while working with each other and the different courses. Even as editors, it would have been hard to put these widgets or extras into CMS without much more forward planning. And regardless, 189 stories with pictures, video, audio and links isn't half bad.

It was tiring, fairly stressful, time consuming and occasionally frustrating. But we couldn't have had a better departmental experience for what it's like to be in a newsroom.

I must thank too all the departmental staff who helped, including Hadrian with the website, and Christine for all the online advice.