1. Community Radio News ’11-’12

1. Community Radio News ’11-’12

24 January 2022 / by CIVL Radio
Funded by the Community Radio Fund of Canada

Community News Updates with Tiffany Suderman — September 2011 – April 2012 — $5,880

With these funds, CIVL was able to hire train, and supervise one youth under the age of 30 to research, write, read, record, edit, and file one 3-5 minute news update each weekday in two hours for a 10 am daily deadline. 

The project also helped recruit a high school student from Rick Hansen Secondary, Gagan Lidhran to volunteer, filing interviews and reports on Kony2012, the 99% movement, the Rick Hansen Man in Motion 25th Anniversary, as well as helping herself to recruit four other Hansen students who co-host, along with Gagan, a program that ran for two and a half years on CIVL called Harmony.

Following the grant’s completion, CIVL received several semesterly work study positions funded by UFV, continuing the daily news updates from Alicia Williams of Mood Swings, who went on to read and write commercial news for 89.5 The Drive in Chilliwack, Daryl Johnson of Disposable Existence, Vanessa Broadbent of UFV’s Cascade Student News, Dominic Jersak of Yes Men Jr., who completed a Yale Secondary co-op placement as newsperson. 

Surjeet Kalsey of Apni Awazz, and Quinn McIntosh of The Sound of Light both provided weekly news updates over the years.


CIVL follows the below format developed for use in this project, in order to collect and produce effective regular news updates: 


A) 

A news update will be made up of 2-4 minutes of news each.
A good, quick demo has multiple brief, relevant news pieces. The most newsworthy and important items are at the beginning, and the lighter, less notable ones are towards the the end.


B) 

An average story should be three parts:
1 short, to the point introductory statement or sentence, ALWAYS written in the present tense, telling people what is happening NOW in regards to the story. This is how you set up the story.
A body section providing details about the story, whatever is most important to explaining what’s happened. Try to edit your writing down to trim as many extra words, statements, phrases, and instances of repetition or inconsequential information.
1 sentence providing the most up to date information on the story, important dates coming up to watch for more developments or some closure, etc. This is your conclusion.
A good, direct news story might be 15-20 seconds, so least 5 but no more than 8 stories in two minutes.


C) 

To identify which stories to put in what order during the newscast, use the following criteria; the higher number of separate criteria that are satisfied in each story, the stronger the story, and earlier it should appear in the newscast:

1. Most impact to the most listeners

2. Most relevant to Fraser Valley residents/UFV community/students

3. Time sensitivity, immediateness of the story

4. Relevance to the environment

5. Human interest, appeal to people’s emotions

6. Technology, if you have clips, sounds, quotes, anything you have access to that makes this story more interesting to tell or listen to

7. Inequality issues (in commercial news, the final category is “Sex”, since “sex
sells”, but C/C radio is concerned with accessibility and anti-oppression, such that
examining issues of inequality are far more desirable stories to cover, and in fact
are appropriate in a way that “Sex” as a criteria in and of itself is not)

D) 

We are a campus and community radio station, and thus our news content should be focused on providing listeners with information about goings on that are either on different topics, or from different perspectives than those that are told on commercial/corporate radio.