TV News Broadcast Week 4

We were without Angus Scott this week, so Brian took over the lesson in his absence and we went over some highly useful Writing Skills. As journalists, basic writing skills should be a given. But advanced writing, and writing under house styles can be a very different deal indeed, as some journalism companies will require a different style of writing compared to what you might be used to. So practicing different styles of writing for different forums will always help for a range of journalism skills.

Firstly, we studied the styles of BBC News Online. We discussed how we thought that this particular brand of the news was deliberately built to be dull and talk in a blatantly straight style of delivery, and that this is the general “House Style”.

The “Drop Intro” is a delayed introduction to the article that builds up the story by prolonging the release of information in the article. This is a widely used trick that is used to draw people into reading the story more because it starts off with a headline and then the “Drop Intro” delivers information in a suspended way. In order to write a story in a shorter way that is a quick delivery, it’s better to think of how you would tell the story if you were telling it to one of your friends over a phone call. This kind of thinking acts as a filtering system for the information – one single piece of information can define your entire day and go to the top of your agenda for telling people about your day, so why wouldn’t it be the same for your article? Filter out anything that isn’t important, and leave in the interesting facts that not only other people would want to read, but that you would want to read as well.

Writing the news consists of six main elements: Who/What/When/Where/Why and How. All of these elements are important for delivering the correct and accurate facts of the story, but the way the story is built up is more like a pyramid:

At the top

There is the intro.

Short and sharp and

The latest information.

This is called the TOPLINE

And it must be absolutely fantastic

On the second bit of the pyramid is the

Elaboration of the information already delivered

The third part is all about the chronology of the event

And lastly the fourth part goes into more detail and ties up any loose ends.

Basically, the system works best by delivering the key information in a short, sharp and to the point way that hooks people in, before expanding more and more on the details, but working backwards from most important information to least important.

When writing any kind of news, you have to remember that it is about people, and therefore you have to find a way that any story best relates to humans. Also, it doesn’t do well to be passive, as you need to find an angle that works whilst thinking about your demographic and how it will apply to them.

If there is a particular thing you would like to say in an article, but cannot say it yourself, it’s always best to try and find someone who will officially quote it for you. Obviously, this is not meant in the sense of anything defamatory, but more in the sense of using emotive language which you should usually refrain from using. If there is a particularly, emotionally gripping phrasing of an event you would like to use, you can quote someone else’s opinion of it and use that as part of the article. This then adds “colour” to your words.

It’s always good to get the better information across first and not hold out on the readers in order to get them to keep reading, as they will likely lose interest. You should also avoid using adverbs and adjectives whenever possible, and above all if you don’t understand something that you’re putting into an article, then the likelihood is that neither will the readers, so why put it in? Leave it out if you wouldn’t read it yourself!

We then went on to talk about the Fatal Errors System, a set of rules that are likely to land you in pretty hot water should you ever fall foul of them. Basically, these consist of things that (if you have any kind of common sense anyway) you wouldn’t do as a journalist, like printing a story which has any kind of malice, dishonesty or causes disruption or disrepute. Obviously, all of these are on the Winchester Journalism website as well, so these are things that should be looked over if you’re ever unsure.

After we did an exercise putting all this into practise by taking the information from a police story and turning it into a short story of our own, you realise just how tough it is to stay within all these parameters that have now been set. It’s in the phrasing, and what information best fits where, and avoiding overly dramatic use of language as is the normal temptation of ANY creative writers!

Finally, we looked into SEO, which is Search Engine Optimisation. This is always useful if you run your own blog and want to appear high in any search engine terms when people search for a specific subject that you are blogging about. The best way of having any kind of SEO is to link together with other websites so that people will find your website a lot more easily from other pages, and that way you generate more traffic to your site.