Media Skills 2014!Week 7: Writing For TV and Radio !

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Dr Kane Hopkins

Television

TV technology: the influence on commercial news

• The remote control• Ratings driven• Competitive• Requires a passive

audience• Discrete packets of

information• Closure• Social aspect of shared

information

• Generation Y (mid 70s to mid 90s): 2/5 children watched TV daily – rapid storytelling = shorter attention span, greater ability to process multiple stimuli: “Generation X... On steroids!” (Yan, 2006, p. 1)

• Generation Z (mid 90s to 2005): multi-taskers, ‘power-browsers’ (Carr, 2011).

Some basics

• Television news bulletins relatively short-not more than 20 minutes of a half hour bulletin on a commercial station

• Stories not more than 1.5 minutes long at most, sometimes only a few seconds

• Superficial coverage• Polarisation• Complex ideas or issues don’t work here• Do not expect ‘fair’ treatment

A current affairs program can be thought of as something like a Western:

Sheriff/Good guy

Villain/Bad Guy

Maiden in distress/Victim

Towns-people/You the audience

Some questions to ask...

• What would your angle look like oversimplified and sensationalised?

• Is it worth the risk?• Is your issue/information/perspective too complex and

nuanced to work as ‘good versus evil’ or ‘right versus wrong’?

If you do decide to go ahead...

• TV is dominated by PICTURES and visual technologies. You need to know about……

- Filetape- Satellite feed- SMT- VNR

Filetape

• Television runs on vision and only the strongest of stories will run without it

• Visual material is often accepted and sometimes requested when covering issues or events not easily accessible to news cameras

• Examples may be of mining or outback scenes which can be impractical to access quickly

Filetape

• This material is known as ‘B-rolls’ or ‘wilds’ and is likely to become ‘stock footage’ or ‘file tape’, used when visuals are needed for future stories

• Studies have shown a reliance on such footage: Putnis (1994) showed that the same visual material was used repeatedly, with over 50% of domestic commercial news stories in Brisbane using file footage

Filetape

• Film updated file images and send them to television stations.

• Program producers pass these to librarians, and in the heat of the moment will use the most recent footage.

• It will be your fault if the ‘latest’ footage of your organisation is of a riotous picket two years ago…this vision could turn the treatment of any story about your labour relations hostile to your aims.

Satellite Feed

• An expert from another city or overseas is invited to be interviewed on a program

• Satellite feeds are difficult to perform, as they are often ‘live’ and unedited and the satellite needs time to be booked and then stuck to rigorously. Because of the cost of satellite time, interviews need to begin and end precisely to schedule

• Combines vision and sound, sometimes with a delay (in the case of international broadcasts)

Satellite Media Tours (SMT)

• Alert multiple broadcast outlets to a satellite feed opportunity• Are expensive but compared with taking spokesperson or

celebrity to every tv station, might be cheaper• MUST be newsworthy, entertaining, etc., eg with a famous

subject• Location is also important, depending on budget

Video News Releases (VNRs)

• These days the technology is so expensive and the quality expectation so high that you would NEVER make your own VNR with a handycam

• Hire a specialist TV production firm to do it for you• But you need to know how to brief them• Who uses them?

- Big corporations, big sporting organisations, for example the NFL (USA) has its own film company purely to make VNRs (Lesser, 2000)

- NFL Films produces more than 2000 hours of television programming a year & has won 78 Emmy awards

Video News Releases (VNRs)

• A television version of the media release, including visuals, scripted audio and “talent”

• Hardly used in NZ, due to cost/resources and industry resistance to accepting them

• Ethical concern about whether (if used) they are identified as VNRs rather than actual news stories

• The news media does however seek out “vision” and access to interview “talent” – for them to put together in their own way

• Note also the rise of “citizen” or viewer-provided footage (especially popular in reporting of weather in NZ!)

Using VNRs

• Ring the TV channel and ask if their own camera operators do any freelance

• Provide about five minutes of various footage rather than a pre-produced 1-minute story

• Check what technology (what kind of tape, etc) is required• Find partners to keep costs down (e.g. product placement)• Choose timeless topics• Target slow news days

(Jones, 2000)

Television News

• In NZ, key news outlets are TV1 (state-owned but commercial model) and TV3 (high levels of local content); Prime and Sky carry little local content; Maori TV news well regarded but small audience

• Across all age groups TV is the most trusted news medium, and is the most pervasive/influential

• Stories tend to be brief, simple and visual; TV is unique in its combination of visual and audio

• Language needs to be simple to not compete with audience’s visual processing

• Main roles of PR are provision of visuals and talent, across a range of programming including current affairs; note also the rise of citizen journalism.

Radio

Radio News

• Radio News Bulletins short — only 1.5-3 minutes long• So little time for detail in each story• Always hungry for updates• Extremely flexible, so very useful in a crisis situation

Radio News

• Radio is good for short, direct messages especially when speed and accessibility are factors

• Less depth in NZ and fewer provincial resources except for Radio NZ; many commercial (and even community/iwi) stations; very fragmented; opportunities for promotional linkages and talkback

• “Breakfast” and “drive time” key parts of radio day• Print has the advantage of allowing “review” of material;

radio doesn’t.

Writing A Radio Release

• Usually 2-4 pars in length (about 3 words per second); up to 30 seconds for audio (good “talent” is important)

• Present tense• Little background or complex explanations• Same story will be rewritten 2-3 times for variety, especially

intro• A PR person needs to train organisational talent to speak in

sound bites (10-20 seconds)• Speed is important; work fast!

Writing for Different Audiences

• Planning is always the first stage; consider first your intended audience

• What is the best medium for communicating with your intended audience? And how will these different mediums influence your choice of words?

• Remember that writing isn’t just a written version of speech, and speech is not easily transcribed to the written word

• Newspapers are much more in-depth; 30mins of TV news wouldn’t fill the front page of a broadsheet newspaper!

Broadcast Audiences

• One of the key skills of a media/public relations professional is the ability to write effectively for different audiences, and through different mediums

• There is a trend towards audiences becoming more narrow and specialised (“fragmented”), making it important for you to selectively target multiple media outlets

• Convergence of media means blurred boundaries (e.g. between radio and TV; newspapers and Internet), often reflecting shared ownership and resources.

Broadcast News Releases

• Spell out phonetically foreign or complicated words• Use short sentences; simple language and punctuation• Use contractions and short words• Active verbs; more conversational and less formal expression• “Word pictures” better than complex numbers and statistics• Paraphrase direct quotes.

and we’re done!