Readings 11

Actually, just one reading this week. Chapter 19 in the text book, to be exact. And this chapter focus on my bread-and-butter, Television and Radio writing. Now, I'm a journalism major and not a TV/R guy, but broadcast is my thing and from my work at ICTV, I know a thing or two about the subject. With that in mind, I'll probably add my two cents here and there from NewsWatch producing on the commentary and insight that the book provides.

They say that a half-hour news program only covers the same number of words as one-half of a newspaper's front page. This may be true, but since each story only gets about 30 seconds devoted to it, the content is much more diverse. There are many things to consider when making a story for TV/Radio* rather than just a printed copy. (*Note: I'm a TV guy, so from here on out I'll probably just say TV instead of TV/Radio.)

1. Timeliness: Many papers come out once a week, or report on events happening within the month or future things, but TV is so immediate that CNN and other news networks can air a story as they happen, and not just report on a past event. This also means that if one story is covered for one day (like when the actress who played the Yellow Power Ranger died on September 10, 2001) and something happens the next day, TV stations will quickly pick up the "new news" and leave the rest for the back pages of papers and online sites. Even if something older is covered on TV, writers wil ltry to add and update or sence of urgency to keep the viewer thinking that its still important content.

2. Information: Not really that big to TV people, since like I said earlier not much time is devoted to each story. For long-report TV shows like 60 Minutes and 20/20, in-depth and investigative info is good, but for normal "readers" (30-second stories) the "big news" of the story is much more important that the background.

3. Audio or Visual Impact. This is a big one, especially for me at NewsWatch 16. What it comes down to is that you dont want to sit there and read the newspaper to the viewer, you want to offer something more, like footage of new construction, or a taped quote from a local politician. Sure, you can say what they said, or describe what something looks like, but so can newspapers. With so much technology available to TV/R newsrooms, they need to take advantage of it to captivate their audiences.

4. People. Kinda goes with number 3, but it's a little more specific. Instead of just reporting on an event, or accident, or decision, try and find a person (or "face") to follow throughout the ordeal. This gives the viewer someone to identify with, and gives you something to film, interview and add depth to any story.

The chapter also goes over some smaller things that are important to TVR news production. One example is reading what you write, which reinforces the conversational style of the boradcast. Since anchors will be reading the stories out loud, its good practice to...practice so that the tone of the anchor will be informative, not confused. It's also good to add pronounciations of long or diffucult words, and lead-ins & wrap-ups to give a little background to reports.

A lot of the scripting techniques are complicated, but if you use a program like ENPS then the formatting is built-in. Working at ICTV has definately futhered my knowledge on a lot of topics that are covered in the book, and often I felt like while I was reading, I was listening to my producers from freshman year tell me about how to prepare my stories. Well now I'M the producer, so hopefully I don't mess any of these techniques up.