Radio Broadcast Week 7

This week, after listening back to our radio packages from the two weeks prior and receiving some constructive feedback, we discussed the news priority of radio stations and how they differ from the news in print.

To start with, the running order of the news stories depends on the target audience and the reach of the radio station. This means that it makes the most sense for the radio stations to prioritise the news stories that will be affecting their target audience the most. All news bulletins normally start with the most widespread top national or international story before moving on to more locally based stories surrounding the area of the station. It mostly depends on how many people are affected and how widespread the news story is.

We all partook in an interesting exercise in which we had to re-write some news stories into as short a form as possible for broadcasting as part of a radio news bulletin. A lot of this proved difficult, as it is a lot different from the typical structuring of news in print (i.e. the Pyramid system that has been so often spoken of). Instead, the most important part of the story should be the bit that goes first, and then the rest of the details should follow after that. Though I personally might have failed a bit miserably at the exercise, I definitely think that it was an eye-opening one that will help a lot when it comes to doing more radio-based news bulletins later on.

The second part of today was used for working on our voicing and phrasing. Obviously, since Radio has no visuals to accompany it, a lot more of the audiences attention is focussed on your voice and how you speak. As such, there are some very important things to remember abbout the way you accentuate words and what it means if you do.

How you say a sentence affects the meaning of the sentence just as much as the content of it!

The points that we were given to remember about how we use our voice on the radio consisted of the six following points, coincidentally enough all beginning with "P":

--> Pace - this should be consistant, but at the same time not monotonous. It should be slightly slower than normal conversation, but not at such a pace that it send the listener to sleep!

--> Pause - well placed pauses arrest the audiences attention. Pause between stories to give the listener time to digest the last bit of information.

--> Phrasing - means grouping words into a sense unit. A sense unit is commonly described as "a mental concept spoken in one breath", for those of you who didn't know... tut tut...

--> Pitch - position of sound on the tone of scale. Variation of the pitch of your voice will give colour and depth to the meaning of what you are reading, which tends to heighten the importance of words.

--> Pronounciation - ironically enough, spoken as "pr-nun-ciation", this is the clarity of your words and how they are said, as well as emphasis on parts of the words. Don't forget that with such words as record, there are different meanings of the same word depending on where your pronounciation emphasis goes (i.e. record and record meaning two different actions).

--> Practise - does, indeed, make perfect!