Initial Response to Brief

The first part of our 'News and Current Affairs' Package that we have been set as our first group-based television project. For the assignment, we are required to write and produce a News package production.

There are only a few rules:
- The assignment has to be an informative package that is relevant to The Manchester College
- Has to follow some of the rules and conventions that are used in contemporary news packages
- The sequence must be between 30seconds and 1 minute

We responded to the brief by sitting in our group and discussing possible angles that we could approach this assignment from. We brainstormed our ideas using knowledge that we already had of The Manchester College to see if our combined knowledge could create a unique, interesting and informative news story. We looked at fairly broad and general topics in the hope that we could find a new angle on an already covered story. Some of the ideas we came up with were quite generic and felt that those areas had already been explored, and would not produce any new and exclusive information.

A rather half-hearted mind map shows our initial discussion- (or the lack of it)

As is evident, we didn't really find anything of descent quality. One of the 'unique' ideas that we looked into was regarding the headmaster of The Manchester College. As 1st years at the college, we are yet to meet the head teacher of our institution. We looked and developed a possible idea and angle.

As the Manchester College is split up into 17 different campuses/sites - the odds of bumping into the Principal of the whole college is highly unlikely. We looked at this unusual "phenomenom" as none of the members of our group had met the Principal - let alone knew his name. We thought this was odd for a college, as all of the educational institutes we had attended before had provided a figure of institution, whereas The Manchester College had not provided any information about the controller of the Higher Education establishment, which i thought was odd. After a brief information gathering session, we found a page of information on the college website about the Principal - which provided little information about the person in question.

Here is a link to the page on the college website: http://www.themanchestercollege.ac.uk/about/welcome
I didn't know you we're allowed to fight without your handbag
As is apparent from this page - there is little to no information on the character himself and therefore nothing we could use to get a good angle if we were to persue it as a news package, so we decided it wasn't really the right direction for our assignment.

Whilst browsing the news archives on the Manchester College looking for a "scoop", i came across an article talking about one of the students attending the Manchester College. Her name is Emily Rawlins. Further research into the student revealed a possible story/angle for me to persue.