Derek Crookes

Derek Crookes has worked at Radio 1 since 2005, which has a target market of 18-24 year olds, and they always try to look for stories that aren't covered elsewhere as well as thee main stream stories.

Derek studied at City University in Islington for four years, and did some free work experience with various places, (it is now possible to do a trainee course in journalism at the BBC).

Crookes started newsreading nights and weekends, this is the standard to start off with, working for LBC radio station, and went freelance so he could work his way up to National News. So when he started working at Radio 1, reporting and newsreading, he was on a freelance contract, now has ommited to a permanent contract. He is currently working on developing the newsbeat website to make it more modern, appealing, and up to date.

An average day for Derek is having a meeting at 8am where everyone presents their ideas for the days news stories, these will be broadcasted throughout the day and so must be interesting to the target market. Derek constantly has access to facebook and twitter to catch the latest stories, following not only places in the UK but Australia and America too to get different news stories, also has subscriptions to newspapers, whilst travelling into work Derek catches up with these sources and networks. There is a lot of rules that have to be followed when working with newsreading, it's a must to have at least two liable sources to verify a story is true, as some stories found could be just rumour. Due to social networking playing such a massive role in this target market, newsbeat uses facebook and twitter to use photos to engage the audience, these can be easily be spread and shared, widening the audience.

This isn't a job where you start once you get to work, you need to already have stories at the start of the day. To do this they look at every story possible, and then narrow down to what their target audience would want to hear. All the stories are scripted for legal reasons and as it sounds better on air, even if sometimes it sounds like it isn't scripted so much as they use conversational language.

Thanks for reading! 

Charlotte.