Too many long complicated stories will slow the pace of the whole bulletin and allow the attention of your listeners to wander. The whole effect is one of a slower pace. The story itself may need to be slightly longer. It will have a fast pace.īy comparison, a story explaining some involved political controversy may need slightly longer sentences with words expressing more complicated ideas. The report of a fire, for example, will usually be written in short sentences, using short snappy words to convey simple ideas. By pace we mean the length and tone of a story as it appears to the listeners. You must also get the right pace of stories through your bulletin. But there is some freedom within bulletins to re-order stories to add variety and balance to the bulletin as a whole. Whatever your station format, your ranking of stories in order in the bulletin will give your listeners some indication of how important you consider each story. Of course, the actual mix of stories, their tone and pace of delivery will depend to a degree on the format of your station serious national broadcasters tend to use more serious stories, delivered in a more deliberate style whereas youth-oriented music station bulletins might be lighter and brighter with more stories about popular culture. They expect a balance of items, some heavy and some light, some about major political events and some about ordinary people. If you put a string of economic stories (however important) at the start of the bulletin, you risk losing your listeners' interest. Try to avoid seeing the bulletin simply as a collection of individual, self-contained stories. The two main factors you have to consider are the overall order or balance of the bulletin and the pace of it.
However, once you feel confident that you can put together a simple bulletin, you can start to consider some extra factors which will change it from a list of stories to a proper bulletin. If you are putting together your first bulletin, stick to this technique. It is usual to give the most important story first and the least important story last. Remind yourself of the criteria for what is news: Is it new, unusual, interesting, significant and about people?Įach of these criteria will help you to decide what stories you should include in your bulletin and where you should place them within your five, 10 or 15 minutes. Preparing a bulletin should not be difficult if you remember the basic principles of news reporting. In some countries, grabs are called cuts or inserts. Grabs are used in a similar way to quotes in a newspaper story. A short segment of actuality is called a grab.
This is usually the sound of someone speaking, perhaps taken from an interview or a speech.
TELEVISION AND RADIO ANNOUNCING PDF TO EXCEL HOW TO
In the previous chapter, we discussed writing news for radio and television, with advice on how to simplify your writing and how to structure your stories to be most effective.