In this weeks lesson, we discussed in further detail the running order of newscasts. We studied an ITV News At Ten broadcast for the running order of the news stories as well as the scripts that they use in each of the packages and the images that accompany them. The most important news items come first, and they normally have equally striking pictures to go along with them. How can you tell how important a news piece is? It's normally to do with how widespread the effect of the story is, and how current and up-to-date it is or if it is an on-going news story with recent updates. The sounds of the news reports fit alongside the images at certain points without the need for scripting over them, as they both tell important parts of the news story.
The ITV News report on this particular day didn't have too much "hard" news to go on, and as such some of the stories seemed to be grasping to find some legitimacy in the news report. The audience for this particular news report consists mostly of people who are already watching ITV for shows like I'm a Celebrity... and therefore obviously doesn't have quite as much of an audience as BBC News does. The headlining "bombs" of this news report consisted mainly of the on-going student protests, the situations on British railways, the snow that will soon be hitting England and how it will affect us, and The Ashes.
In the report of the on-going student protests, there were clearly not too many up-to-date visuals to accompany the story, so there is some older archived footage being put to use in this report, but the way they have been "treated" by using effects and slow-motion makes them more interesting to look at. The shots that are new are still interesting, and have good sounds that accompany them, but they don't contain enough action to give a new dimension to the news report that hasn't been covered before. Either way, this is a good example of presenting an on-going news story that has new developments as a leading story.
After studying the news report, we went on to look at how important numbers are in any given news report, but especially when being put up in graphics on a televised news report. Facts, figures, rates, percentages, costs and everything else like that can go a long way towards providing important information in the story that you are doing.
To round off the lesson, we took part in a couple of exercises to put the skills we have been studying to use. The first exercise that we did proved to be very interesting as we were given a set of stories from an actual news report and we had to put them in what we thought was the correct order. For the most part, each of us got a couple of them right, but interestingly enough and for various different reasons, a number of them came up in a different order to what we thought. This exercise proved to be very interesting and will be useful when further studying further news reports.
The second exercise that we put our minds to the test on was being given 10 minutes to write a 15 second voice over of a video clip for a news story. This again proved to be a bit tougher than I had originally expected, as I personally was taking slightly more creative approach to the writing whereas it really should be the most absolutely important information going at the very start of the story, with other information following after that. Overall, I think that these exercises were very eye-opening and interesting to do, and they definitely proved useful in learning more about the functionality of TV News.
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