Writing and Reporting News You Can Use

Tammy Trujillo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351979658
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Writing and Reporting News You Can Use instructs students on how to produce news that is informative, interesting, educational, and most importantly, compelling. It addresses roadblocks to student interest in writing news, using illustrative examples and exercises to help them understand how to write news that is interesting and accurate. Trujillo's hands-on approach is based on real-world strategies that deal with audience and market characteristics. Students are writing from the very beginning while also getting the ethical and legal grounding necessary to understand the field. This textbook is a complete resource for students learning broadcast news, including how to get a job after leaving the classroom.

Part I
Introduction

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Introduction

In this Chapter

1. • Why Most Students Don't Listen to or Watch the News
2. • Where the News Comes From
3. • What Makes News Appear Boring
4. • What Can be Done to Make it Interesting
5. • What Students Will Learn From the Book

Boring, irrelevant, negative. . . some of the words used by students to explain why they don’t watch or listen to the news. And often, they’re not totally wrong.

News is primarily negative. That’s a fact. And unfortunately, the more negative a story is, the more attention it is likely to get. Sadly, that means that listeners have become accustomed to thinking that if a story isn’t mostly negative in nature, it’s not news. There’s an awful phrase used in newsrooms, “If it bleeds, it leads”. Awful, but true.

As News Director at a Los Angeles radio station in the 1990s, we decided to try something different. I realized that when people woke up to us on their clock alarm, there we were, starting their day off with “doom, gloom, death and destruction”. What a way to wake up! Kind of makes you want to pull the covers back over your head and just hide in bed all day.

So we decided to start our twice-an-hour newscasts with a positive story. Not a silly or funny story, but one about something that wasn’t negative. There are plenty of them out there. Hero stories, stories about medical breakthroughs, people being successful, etc. My morning show partner and I certainly began enjoying our newscasts more. And we thought our listeners were too.

That is, until we started getting letters and faxes (remember, this is the mid-1990s; emails and texts are still some years off). People wanted to know why I was no longer doing the news!

We’ve been taught that the first story of the newscast is supposed to be the most important one going on at the moment. And in most models, it should be. But in our case, people were hearing a positive story and, because of conditioning, didn’t see it as important. And, in as much, they thought that if that story was the most important one of the cast, then the rest of the stories would be far less important. Many told us that because of that, they were tuning out and going elsewhere on the dial for their morning news.

Two big rules in broadcasting. . . get them there and then keep them there! We were a very popular station, so we were getting the listeners. . . but we were also letting them get away by not meeting their expectations. So, our experiment was over. We went back to opening the news with “doom, gloom, death and destruction”. And everyone was happy. . . or were they?

Remember, one of our biggest complaints, not just from students, but from people in general, is that news is negative!

So what do we do?

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First, We Need to Know Where News Comes From!

How do radio and TV stations find the stories that eventually end up in their newscasts?

Much of what is heard and seen in television and radio news is taken straight from one of several wire services. Two of the biggest are the Associated Press and Reuters. These companies churn out news; local, national and international, non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They also cover sports, weather, business and entertainment. There is a lot of material and a lot of it is negative. And a lot of it also might seem irrelevant to your listeners.

These stories are often written quickly and are written not only for the electronic news media, but also for published news outlets such as newspapers.

That’s part of the problem. The writing styles between the two mediums are quite different. If someone takes a story that is written for publication and reads it on the air verbatim, chances are the story is going to sound very unnatural and stilted. It needs to be re-written in a style that lends itself to the spoken word as opposed to being read silently.

The stories are written in a variety of lengths. Some are very short, 15–20 seconds. It’s hard to really tell a complete story in that amount of time. Others are much longer, possibly as long as two to three minutes.

News writers work on many, many stories a day. . . sometimes upwards of 80 to 100 a shift at a 24-hour-a-day news radio station. And in moving that fast, sometimes wire copy is not re-written or only very lightly re-written. And if information isn’t in the piece of wire copy that was assigned to a writer to use to create a story, it often doesn’t end up in the script for air either, so the relevance of the story to the audience may be lost.

The wire services cover the big stories. That’s their job. They’re trying to please everyone. . . all the different entities and companies that subscribe to their services. They hit the major stories of the day. They handle the biggest of the regional stories. And when it comes to stories local to an area, they cover only the biggest of those as well. So the smaller stories, the ones that might be important or of interest to local neighborhoods or groups, don’t show up.

So with all that said, what is there to do? How do we make news interesting, informative and yes, even entertaining? In other words, how do we create “News You Can Use” (and want to listen to)?

It takes some work, thinking, creativity and artistry.

It all starts with knowing your audience. If you are putting together a newscast for the students who listen to your college radio or TV station, a story about cuts in Medicare shouldn’t be in it.

It’s an important story, just not to your audience. In this scenario, it’s a ‘who cares story’, one that will cause most of your listeners to tune out.

Just because a story is on the wire service doesn’t mean it necessarily belongs in your newscast. You need to keep your audience in mind when you sort through the massive amount of news coming down from the wire services. You want to select stories that will matter to your audience. And it’s a guarantee that all of them will not.

What are the people in your listening audience talking about? That’s also news, even though it might not be on the wires. You need to decide what’s in your newscast, don’t let the wire services do that for you. There are many sources for story ideas, including your own life and the lives of the other people at the station.

Just because a story isn’t on the wire service doesn’t mean it’s not news! It simply may be a story that the wires didn’t pick up. Think outside the box! Using personal, everyday experiences to create news stories can make your newscasts more relative and interesting to your audience. And you’ll have stories on your air that the other local stations don’t. . . making your station and your newscasts stand out.

“News You Can Use” is about making sure that while we still cover the “doom, gloom, death and destruction” that unfortunately makes up the bulk of the news and is what our listeners expect from us, we also are making sure that every story counts.

In this book, we will focus on creating stories and newscasts that still cover the important stories and events but can no longer be called ‘irrelevant or boring’. We’ll learn how to ask the hard questions during an interview and get amazing audio and video that will bring the story into focus while making listeners care. We’ll find ways to ‘color’ stories with natural or ambient sound and music, sound effects and other production elements.

So forget what you think about the news and join me in creating “News You Can Use”.

Part II
The Basics

1 What is News and Where Does It Come From?

In this Chapter

1. • Different Types of News
2. • Reactions to News
3. • Wire Services
4. • Audio and Video Services

Increase Your Industry Vocabulary

• AP – Associated Press, one of the largest news-gathering and disseminating companies in the world
• International – Covering the world, from any country
• Kicker – A fun or entertaining story, usually used to end the newscast on a positive note or can be used as a bridge between news stories and sports and weather
• Local – A story from the area mainly served by the radio or TV station, usually covers several counties
• National – A story originating from somewhere in the United States
• Regions/Regional – A story that comes from the geographic region the radio or TV station covers such as the Southwest, Northwest, Midwest or East Coast
• Reuters – An international news agency headquartered in London that covers international news, business, politics and other news
• Wire service – A news agency that supplies news materials to newspapers, radio and television stations

As we said in the Introduction, most people think that to qualify as news, a story has to be about “doom, gloom, death and destruction”. After all, that is how many news outlets program their news. And unfortunately, there are a lot of negative things that happen in the world that need to be covered. But there are certainly a lot of other stories out there as well that can and often deserve to be covered in our news reporting.

One of the key goals in anything that we program on the air is to get a reaction from our audience. A well-written story should create some sort of feeling in our viewers or listeners. If it doesn’t, then we need to question why that story is taking up our airtime.

The majority of radio and TV stations that program news subscribe to services that report from all over the world. They provide the copy, audio and even video for these subscribing stations to either simply use as-is on the air or to use as material to create their own versions of the stories.

But they cannot cover every single story that happens each day, especially the smaller stories that may not make a difference on a national or even regional level, but are often of great importance to our local communities. It takes effort to find these stories and include them to create a balanced and valuable newscast for our audiences.

Different Types of News

There is no perfect answer to the question “What is news?” News basically is anything that happens that is of interest to your audience. Sometimes the most important story of the day is of a national level; sometimes it is international. It can also be local or it can even be a human-interest story or something from the world of entertainment.

Stories come in a variety of categories:

1. Stories that are of mass appeal and general interest. These are the top issues of the day that have the potential to interest a broad segment of the population. They might include politics, new laws or crime stories.
2. Stories that are educational or informative. These are stories that contain information that the public needs to know. They might include details on evacuations during a wildfire or storm, a crime story that generates a warning for the public or perhaps a story on a medical breakthrough.
3. Stories that are simply interesting or entertaining. These stories often fall into the category of ‘kickers’ or human-interest stories; the more light-hearted stories that we often try to end a newscast with. They can include entertainment-related or humorous stories or feel-good stories like one about a local hero who makes good. They may be as small as a story about who won the local spelling bee, depending, of course, upon the size of the market you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: THE BASICS
• PART III: TIME TO WRITE
• PART IV: WORKING WITH AUDIO AND VIDEO
• PART V: SOCIAL AND MULTI-MEDIA NEWS
• PART VI: PRESENTING THE NEWS
• PART VII: BECOMING A PRO
• PART VIII: CONCLUSION
• About the Author
• Index