“When we talk,” Rooney says, “we repeat ourselves and beat around
the bush.” Those flaws can be avoided in broadcast news writing, but
the sound should still be conversational. After all, on both television
and radio, the announcer is still saying the news to an audience.
Broadcast stories must above all be clear. The viewer or listener has
only one chance to grasp the meaning of a story. A newspaper reader
can take five, 10 or 20 minutes to study a story, but a television or
radio listener must grasp a story in as little as 30 seconds. This requires
a certain simplicity in language and presentation.
In newspaper writing, reporters may use long sentences full of
clauses. Consider this lead from the Baltimore Sun, regarding an unusual
Chinese cultural custom.
Under pressure from international animal-rights groups, the Chinese
government has drafted regulations to prohibit the feeding of large
mammals—such as live cows, pigs and sheep—to tigers and lions as
a form of public entertainment.That lead is more than a mouthful, especially from a broadcast perspec-
tive. The sentence is far too long and clogged with dependent clauses
and participial phrases. Much of the vocabulary, too, is inappropri-
ate for the conversational style of broadcast reporting. Words such as
drafted regulations and prohibited, for example, are within most adults’
reading vocabularies but are rather hard to follow in spoken conversa-
tion. A broadcast version of that story might start like this:
Lions and tigers and bears will have to settle for pet food instead of
snacking on cows and pigs if new laws in China take effect.
Clear and direct language is at the heart of effective broadcast writ-
ing. “Whenever I see ‘which’s,’ ” explains Joyce Davis of NPR, “I take
them out.” Davis says that besides simplifying language and shortening
sentences, she tries to find a lead “as grabby as possible.” You’ve got to
hook the reader after the first five or ten seconds of the story, she says.
Print journalists try to hook readers, too, but broadcast writers face a
greater challenge in holding their audience’s interest throughout the
entire story.
BROADCAST NEWS 439
SAN JOSE, California, 1909—
The first radio station to have
a regular schedule of programs
was experimental station FN,
owned by Charles D. “Doc”
Herrold of San Jose, California.
On top of a local bank build-
ing, Herrold constructed an
antenna that was so large that
wires from it spread to the tops
of several nearby buildings.
Using a primitive microphone,
he began live broadcasting in
1909 with a program of news
and music every Wednesday
night.
Doc built receivers and dis-
tributed them to hotel lobbies
so people could hear his sta-
tion. A local store placed receiv-
ing sets in a special listening
room and hooked up telephone
receivers so customers could
listen to the music.
Herrold’s wife, Sybil, may
have been the first woman
on radio. She hosted a music
program for young people and
even accepted requests for
songs.
Herrold also opened a broad-
casting school in 1909.
Today, station FN is San
Francisco’s KCBS.Your Beat
- Record a local television news show, and compare
its coverage with that of a local newspaper published
the next morning. Did the same stories get covered?
Were some stories ignored on the television news?
What differences can you detect in the way a given
story was covered by each medium? If possible,
record a local radio news show and make a similar
comparison.
2. Take a class survey to find out where students get most
of their news—both local and national. Where do they
turn first to find information about a breaking story?