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Broadcast style writing tips (by Laurie Lattimore)

B

roadcast writing demands a special set of skills and knowledge from the journalist. Broadcast copy is written to be read out loud by a news reader rather than to be read silently by a news consumer. The words and sentences must be constructed so they are accurate and clear. They must also complement the pictures, video and audio that accompany a story.

Notes

Short videos on broadcast writing. For those interested in teaching or learning to write in broadcast style, you should listen to or watch four short video clips about broadcast writing produced by my friend and colleague Mark Harmon, a professor of journalism and electronic media here at UT. They can be found at this Volcasting link. The four clips concern news judgment, attribution, broadcast style and active voice. (All four videos will take less than 10 minutes to watch.) They are well worth the short amount of time it takes to view them. (Posted Oct. 31, 2006)

Couric takes over. In the long history of the CBS Evening News, there had been only three permanent anchors: Douglas Edwards, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. Now there is a fourth. Katie Couric (CBS biography) debuted as the newscast's latest anchor last night. Couric is a legitimate journalist who was part of NBC's news team covering the Pentagon and the Gulf War in 1991. For the last 15 years she has been the host of NBC's Today Show, and her work has not been considered to be on the front lines of reporting. Her main job at CBS is not to deliver the news but to deliver an audience (preferably one that is a little younger than the one CBS has). Here are a few stories and reviews of her first night: New York Times, Washington Post, NPR. (Posted Sept. 6, 2006)

News orgs discover web’s immediacy. A couple of stories from Romenesko’s blog on today show that big time news organizations are discovering the immediacy of the web. One comes from Westworld, which reports that when the Denver Post stumbled onto a scoop last month about beer magnate Peter Coors being arrested for drunk driving, the Post nailed the story and then put it on the organization’s web site – despite some grousing from the traditionalists. These folks thought a story like that should be saved for print first, which was several hours away. The paper’s managing editor said the web would be “our breaking news platform.” Then there is the story about CBS streaming its nightly news program simultaneously with its over-the-air broadcast. This, apparently, has come about only after painstaking negotiations with affiliates. One is tempted to ask: “Where have these folks been for the last 10 years or so?” (Posted Aug. 17, 2006)

Off again, on-again. The general manager of the public radio station in Lexington, Ky., caused a minor flap late last week by announcing that he was pulling Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac off WUKY. Tom Godell expressed some dismay at the language that was cropping up in some of the poems that Keillor had read on the program and fear that his station would be fined by the Federal Communications Commission. Keillor was certainly no Howard Stern, Godell said, but “the FCC has been so inconsistent, we don’t know where we stand.”

That was Friday. By Saturday Keillor was back. The station received so many phone calls and emails from its listeners that Godell was forced to relent. One of those who protested was Leonard Press, the founder and long-time director of Kentucky Educational Television who called the cancellation "an overreaction" and said, "This is a man who is one of the premier writers and performers of our time. I think he's generally recognized for his tastefulness." according to a report in the Cincinnati Post. (See also report in the Lexington Herald Leader.) Godell said he decided to cancel the show after an increasing number of “language advisories” had been sent to produces. Such advisories alert stations to the possibilities of language that might not be suitable to all audiences. In this case, there were references to the female breast and in one poem to getting “high.” While many (including Keillor) are castigating Godell for his decision, we might want to examine whether or not the FCC has created a climate where such fears are legitimate. The heavy-handedness of the FCC should be remembered along with the names of Janet Jackson and Howard Stern.
(Posted Aug. 15, 2005)

Put your news on the pod. Podcasting is one of the new terms in online journalism. It simply means putting news and information into an audio MP3 format and making it available to folks who own MP3 players – millions of them. News web sites, particularly broadcast sites where this is a natural, are beginning to use this method to reach those who want to do more than just listen to music on their MP3 players, according to Jonathan Dube, Cyberjournalist.net. (In addition to the MP3 players, there are lots of cellphones that have MP3 capability.) Dube cites an article in Digital-Lifestyles.info that says the BBC used this method for extending one of its programs late last year, and the file got 100,000 downloads. The technology and technique are not confined to broadcasters, of course. Any news outlet can create these files and offer them to an audience that might not otherwise be exposed to its content. (Podcasting comes from Apple’s iPod, which dominates the world of MP3 players.) (Posted Jan. 25, 2005)
Update: Cyberjournalist has posted more information on the growing phenomenon of podcasting. As a result of the success of podcasting for the radio show On the Media, WNYC is going to start making another of its shows available as an MP3 download. The WNYC news release announcing this plan says the podcasting of On the Media has added significantly to the show's audience:

“Podcasting is a remarkable boon for local radio broadcasts,” added Phil Redo, VP of Station Operations and Strategy. “This easy-to-access, easy-to-use technology allows local programming to transcend the limitations of both traditional radio and online streaming, by allowing users to plug into great programming from far-flung places, anytime, anywhere.”

WNYC launched the first podcast of an NPR program in January 2005 to great success. NPR’s On the Media, the station’s nationally-broadcast media analysis show, has doubled the amount of listeners it reaches online in just four weeks. OTM's podcast audience now rivals the number of individuals that would enjoy the program in a mid-sized media market like St. Louis or Kansas City.

(That is an interesting way to describe the growth int he audience. It would have been nice had the writer of the press release also used some real numbers.) (Posted Feb. 12, 2005)

CBS and the Bush National Guard memos. The big media story of the week was a report of an internal investigation that CBS News conducted on a story aired in September concerning George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard in the 1970s. The report cited memos written by Bush’s superior officers showing that Bush has received favorable treatment both in getting into the Guard and during his service there. The story aired on Sept. 8, 2004, on CBS’s 60 Minutes Wednesday just as the presidential campaign was getting intense; it had originally been scheduled to air on Sept. 29. Soon after the show, many people called into question the authenticity of the memos CBS reporters used as the basis for the story. Initially, CBS and Dan Rather, who reported the segment, defended the story, but they eventually had to back down because the memos had not been properly investigated. CBS suffered a storm of criticism and launched its own internal investigation. The report of that investigation was released this week, and five people from CBS News were fired. (Rather was not one of them.) The report did not clear up the questions about the authenticity of the memos; nor did it specify who at CBS News made the decision to move the broadcast up by three weeks. A good collection of articles  and commentary about this controversy can be found at Journalism.org.
A note on format. CBS News put the report on its web site in a PDF format rather than simply having it in HTML. Consequently, if you wanted to look at the 200-plus page document, you had to download the whole thing onto your computer and then either print it out or try to search through it in Acrobat. Either way, it did not make things easy for the reader. (Posted Jan. 15, 2005)

Breaking in. Want to get into broadcasting? The Poynter Institute (which has a whole section on broadcasting journalism) has a timely article on tips on getting started in broadcast journalism. Here's how it starts:

Dig hard, write well, and maybe even sweep a few floors.

Broadcast professionals say that's what young journalists should do if they're serious about pursuing a career in the competitive field of news broadcasting.

Television and radio students who want to stand out from the crowd must become enterprising, information-sniffing archaeologists, said Al Tompkins, Poynter's broadcast journalism group leader. (more)

Poynter has a wide variety of articles about all phases of journalism. The people at Poynter also respond daily to the major issues and controversies facing the profession. (Posted Jan. 1, 2005)

Broadcast writing tips. If you learned to write for print first (and most of us did), you may have a bit of trouble switching to writing in broadcast style. Laurie Lattimore has compiled a list of tips for making the switch.(Posted Jan. 1, 2005)