Many of the principles of writing for radio and television news programmes are the same. In both media, we try to write Good Spoken English, avoiding journalese, clichés and jargon. We use short and simple sentences, without too many adjectives and adverbs. We try to be accurate at all times, in vocabulary, terminology, basic grammar and pronunciation. We use sensitive language, which will not offend sections of the audience.
But there are also significant differences between radio and television. In my view, radio is a little more straightforward – partly because the flow of information is free of the need to find good pictures; partly because it can be prepared relatively easily and quickly; and partly because for many years it has been an individual activity. A radio journalist working entirely alone can research the story, record all the interviews (checking the batteries and sound levels beforehand), record the commentary, edit the recorded material, and even read the introduction live on air and press the button that plays the report.
Television requires more teamwork. Even today, with lightweight digital cameras and laptop computer-editing bringing more opportunities for multi-skilling and individual newsgathering, most TV news reports require a large number of people to bring them to the screen.
Students of broadcast journalism preparing to go into the profession should be aware that there can be some hostility between news professionals working in radio and television. They seem to occupy three camps.
First, there are the radio loyalists, who believe their medium is the only pure journalism – it is a medium of ideas, argument and analysis, undistorted by the sensationalism of TV or the need to find pictures for everything. It is the ultimate medium for the fine writer, where the spoken word reigns supreme. They will tell you that the pictures are better on radio – meaning it is the medium of the imagination. Even now, in the twenty-first century, there is a lingering resentment that radio – the senior service of broadcast news for decades – was supplanted in the trendy 1960s by the infotainment upstart, television.
Secondly, there are the specialist TV journalists, who love the daily challenge the medium imposes. They will tell you that TV is adrenalin-land. Trying to produce a television news programme can be like riding the Grand National blindfold. It is highly competitive, and the logistics are frightening. But the effort is worth it. The impact of television is enormous, and the satisfaction of producing a fine TV report is unparalleled in journalism. Teamwork is crucial. TV journalists tend to be talkative extroverts, because the production process works only if there is a constant flow of clear communication, whereas a radio newsroom can sometimes resemble a library.
Thirdly, there are the growing numbers of broadcast journalists who are comfortable in either medium, and also enjoy writing versions of their stories for the website. It is clear that, in the years to come, there will be more multimedia news organisations, and more multi-skilling will be required. Having worked in both radio and television throughout my career, I hope that people entering the profession of broadcast journalism will enjoy working in all forms of audiovisual media. But it is important to have a very good understanding of the different qualities of the two disciplines of broadcasting, and the best use of language for news online.
In some ways, radio is untouched by progress. Essentially, it is the same product as when it began in Britain in the 1920s. And that is its enduring strength. Despite the arrival of the biggest mass medium – television – and later the internet, ninety per cent of the UK population use radio for an average of twenty-four hours every week. Radio still enjoys a high rating as the most trusted news medium. It is a mass medium that does not seem to address the ‘mass’, but speaks to the individual.
As for the best way to write news for radio, the essentials have already been covered in earlier chapters. Write as you would speak to an individual listener, in a fairly formal but conversational style. Simplicity and clarity are the main principles, particularly when you are sitting in the newsroom, writing the short summaries. Not counting the unscripted live reports or two-way interviews with reporters, written radio news stories come in four broad types.
• The copy story or straight read, which is read live on air with no illustrative clips of interview or actuality sound.
• The reporter-piece (still called a despatch on BBC World Service), where the newsreader introduces a location report voiced by the correspondent.
• The short package, containing one or two short clips of interview, which may be little more than a minute in duration.
• The package or full package, which can range from ninety seconds to several minutes, and might deploy a range of radio techniques – actuality sound, extracts of speeches, interviews, vox pops (short interviews with members of the public expressing their opinions), an unscripted descriptive passage by the reporter on location, or even music.
The copy story follows similar principles to the writing of intros, described in Chapter 4. It should encapsulate the essential story in the first sentence, then add explanation, and try to ensure a balance of views in as short a time as possible. The writer in the newsroom is in no position to use descriptive words, so the copy story style is pared down and concentrates on facts and clarity, often in short, punchy sentences.
Each newsroom will use its own format, but all will have templates in the computer so that everyone can see the essential information clearly. Most formats have a story title (or ‘slug’), the name or initials of the writer, the date and time of the bulletin, and the duration of the story, which in most computer systems is calculated automatically at three words per second. Copy stories are typically around twenty seconds. Even in longer-form bulletins, they are seldom more than thirty seconds. So a typical copy story might look like this:
Wind Farms (slug). Anne Smith (writer). 27.2.10 (date). 12.00 (time of bulletin).
An environmental group claimed this morning that the development of clean energy in Britain is being obstructed by a conspiracy backed by the nuclear industry. At an enquiry into a proposed offshore wind farm in the Bristol Channel, Greenpeace say the opposition campaign is funded by nuclear power companies determined to scupper the growth of green energy. The Campaign to Protect Rural England say the conspiracy allegation is nonsense. They say their supporters oppose windmills simply because they ruin the landscape and don’t generate much electricity.
0'29"
The script for a package would be the intro, followed by the exact duration of the package, and importantly the last five or six words, called ‘out-words’, so that the studio presenter or engineer will know exactly when it is about to end, and will not be caught by surprise.
With the exception of copy stories, the other types of radio report all seek to use the reporter’s voice, and in the case of packages, actuality – interviews or natural sound that add reality, interest, variety and pace to the reporting. Using the voice of the reporter on the spot, or interviews with people involved in the story, adds credibility as well as immediacy to the journalism.
The distinctive quality of radio reporting from location is that the journalist’s words can express the sense of being there, so that the listeners can capture the atmosphere. For example, a full package on the wind farm enquiry might include the whooshing noise of a wind turbine with some description from the reporter, the sound of waves on the shore as the reporter describes the proposed wind farm which will be visible from a holiday beach, interview clips with spokespeople from Greenpeace and the CPRE, vox-pops with people living near existing windmills, and perhaps the babble of the enquiry room as the package concludes with a look ahead to the arguments likely to be heard in the coming days.
I believe that radio packages should not end with a clip of interview. This literally gives one contributor the last word, and the last word can be disproportionately influential. Not all radio journalists agree with me about this; Radio Four’s Today programme went through a period of several years when the programme style was to end packages with a telling clip of interview. Most producers think that the reporter should ‘wrap’ the story and end the package with his or her own voice. A pay-off immediately after an interview clip is not enough (for example … end of interview clip … ‘Joan Bloggs, Independent Radio News, Nottingham’). The report sounds incomplete; in effect, it still gives the interviewee the last word, and it can sound as though the interview clip came from Joan Bloggs.
Writers of radio news tend to look for opportunities to use the present tense, because it sounds immediate and is quite succinct. So ‘Elton John is suing his former manager …’ is preferred to ‘Elton John has announced that he’ll sue …’; ‘Interest rates are up a quarter per cent …’ rather than ‘The Bank of England has raised interest rates …’.
The present tense can also be used on location for descriptions of events, but it should be used very carefully, and only when there is sufficient drama for this rather dramatic style to seem appropriate. For example:
Mortars slam into the villa. Helicopter gun-ships strafe the site, and two aces are crossed off America’s pack-of-cards most-wanted list.’ (Independent Radio News, July 2003).
Here are a few words of advice about writing location reports for radio news from experienced professionals interviewed for this book.
Richard Sambrook, former Director of BBC News:
In radio you have to paint a picture with the words. People will have an image in their head as they listen to it. With television, of course, they have the image in front of them.
Clare Morrow, former Controller of Programmes YTV and for several years a radio correspondent:
On radio you have got to create the scene. If you are trying to paint a picture of what an explosion or a fire was like, people need to be able to ‘see’ that the flames reached the top of the building. In radio you are trying to create the picture. In television you are trying to think of words that give complementary information to the pictures.
Karen Coleman, former BBC radio correspondent and Foreign Affairs Editor at Newstalk 106 in Ireland:
Radio requires an intelligent understanding of the story and particular care with words. In many ways, it’s easier in TV to let the pictures tell the story for you. In radio you have to be more imaginative in the language you use. You want to be able to convey the real picture. A radio journalist should describe the scene. With experience you learn how to do that.
Lyse Doucet, BBC World Presenter and an experienced foreign correspondent on radio and TV:
Think of all your senses when you write for radio … colours, sounds, even smells … the stench of death … the sharpness of tear gas. Think of painting a picture, and look for detail. A colleague in West Africa reporting on refugees fleeing Nigeria wrote how one man was dragging an anchor with him. It was the detail everyone remembered! But it also gave an insight into the panicked and confused thoughts of people forced to leave everything behind.
As a general rule, a big story needs a little more description than a routine one, because listeners have suddenly become more attentive and want to be able to capture the sense of occasion. BBC Radio Four introduced its series of reporter-packages on 11th September 2001, a few hours after the attacks on America, like this:
An astonishing series of acts of terrorism has been perpetrated in the United States. Countless numbers of people have been killed and injured when at least three apparently hijacked passenger aircraft were flown into buildings in New York and Washington. The twin towers of the tallest building in New York – the World Trade Center – have been destroyed, reduced to rubble. Huge billowing clouds of dust and smoke have engulfed the southern part of Manhattan Island …
The television reports did not need to describe the huge billowing clouds; we could all see them. The radio coverage then used the time-honoured chronology to relate the events of the day. After hearing from terrified eye-witnesses who had seen the first plane strike, the Radio Four coverage switched to BBC reporter Steve Evans, who had been in the World Trade Center when it happened.
I can tell you that I’m looking up at the World Trade Center. There is a cloud of grey smoke in a very clear sky coming from the top of it and now in the last thirty seconds another explosion half-way down the building, and you can see the rent in the side of the building from that explosion. I was in the base of the building when this happened. First of all there was a huge bang, and it felt as though a construction company or something like that dropped a weight from a very very great height. The building physically shook. I initially thought no more about it, thinking there’s a bit of a problem on a building site. But then seconds later there were two or three more very big explosions, and this building, this huge building, towering into the sky, again physically shook, and at that point people came screaming past me saying – ‘Just get out! Just get out! Just get out!’
I realise that descriptive passages on radio tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Most radio journalists will go through their careers reporting many more court cases and political disputes than stories involving huge billowing clouds, the stench of death or the sharpness of tear gas. But my personal view is that radio has become less adventurous in recent years, and rather less atmospheric. I hope a new generation of radio reporters will rediscover the descriptive passage, and even when covering everyday stories, will try to use short sections of atmospheric sound, and look or listen for those little details that bring events to life.
Television makes enormous impact. According to Eurobarometer surveys, which track lifestyle trends across Europe, more than seventy per cent of the population regard TV as their primary source of information. So far, the internet has made little impression on the popularity of television, though I suspect that will change in coming years.
The impact comes from television’s visual power. ‘Of course’, I hear you cry. ‘TV is pictures. Everyone knows that.’ Well, it’s interesting how many aspiring television journalists do not seem to know that. I have seen countless television reports, in different countries, which are essentially radio reports, with pictures slapped on top. General pictures, used to cover an essay from a reporter, are known in broadcasting jargon as ‘wallpaper’, because the picture-editor is asked by the journalist to ‘cover that with some pictures’. This is dreadful technique. It dates back to the days of news being covered on film, by people who had been trained in the film industry, teamed with journalists who had learned their profession in newspapers or radio. Demarcation was accepted. ‘You look after the words, squire. I’ll worry about the pictures’, a news cameraman would say to a reporter.
And back at base, the film would have to go into processing for at least forty minutes before editing could begin. So, while this was happening, the reporter would hammer out the script and record it, so that editing could begin immediately the wet film emerged from the processing bath. In the twenty-first century, it is unforgivable for TV reporters to write their scripts without knowing the available pictures in great detail, and how they will be edited to show the story in the best way.
Computer-based editing has made it much easier to edit the pictures first and write the script afterwards, or, when making a package, to record pieces of commentary while picture editing is in progress, using a lip-microphone to record directly on to each sequence of shots as it is edited. With non-linear digital editing, if the pictures and words don’t quite match, shots can be swapped around, shortened or lengthened in a few seconds. But it’s much better for the script to be adjusted. A shot has a natural length. A script line can be any length you want. If it is a very late story, it may be marginally faster to record the commentary first and slap on pictures. Even then, the script should be written with a very precise idea of what pictures will be seen at every moment.
Martin Bell, one of the best television correspondents I have worked with, who left the BBC to campaign against ‘sleaze’ as an independent Member of Parliament, became so accomplished at editing the pictures and then recording commentary in segments that he would not write a script at all. He would watch and listen to the editing intently, perhaps pace up and down for a few moments, then grab the microphone and record a short section of his report directly on to the edited pictures. I first saw him doing this back in 1980, at the Republican Convention in Detroit. The words matched the pictures perfectly, and the editing happened very fast indeed.
I am certain that the best television news packages have the pictures edited first, so that the shots can be chosen to flow together in a natural sequence and at just the right length for each shot. The journalist will dictate the structure of the piece, and will take a keen interest in the individual shots, perhaps asking the picture-editor for a particular image, which he or she knows can be reflected in the commentary. These days, more and more newsrooms are training their journalists to edit the pictures themselves. This guarantees that the reporter will be thinking in pictures and sequences, and is much more likely to result in a symbiotic relationship between images and words.
Unlike Martin Bell, most reporters write a script after taking notes during the picture-editing, whether or not they are editing the pictures themselves. These notes mark the precise times when key images appear, or interview clips are to be introduced. This is a long-established technique called ‘shot-listing’.
Time codes on the linear editing machines or on the non-linear computer screen have made shot-listing easier in recent years. Some journalists write the shot-list on their computer as the edited pictures take shape, and refer to it carefully as they write their script. Others prefer to use the older technology of the notebook, to scribble ideas alongside the shot-list. The notes for a ninety-second package might look something like this.
0–3" | Sound of chanting ‘four more years’ as Obama enters hall for campaign rally. |
4–13" | Barack Obama and beaming Michelle mount stage and wave from podium. Crowd wave banners. Note placards saying ‘Change’. |
13–17" | Afghanistan vets in front row. |
17–32" | Obama clip 1 (Finish the job). |
32–36" | Shot of Hillary Clinton looking determined. |
36–39" | Large Statue of Liberty balloon is held up. |
39–58" | Obama clip 2 (Economic recovery theme). |
58–1'12" | Protesters behind police cordon outside calling for more jobs, chanting ‘America doesn’t work’. 1’07” to 1’09” |
1'12"–1'24" | Piece to camera (stand-up). |
1'24"–1'30" | The Obamas shake hands with supporters. |
With detailed notes like these, it’s not too difficult to write a script that allows short pauses for the natural sound, and uses visual references throughout, by mentioning Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton at the right times, mentioning that the president’s big challenge is disenchantment with his 2008 promise of ‘change’, that he is campaigning on the twin messages of security and jobs – starting to bring the boys home from Afghanistan while insisting he will never flinch from the battle for freedom and security, and creating jobs at home in a sustainable recovery – but not coming into contact with the unemployed demonstrators, who were kept well away from the rally.
Shot-listing works for television stories of any length, where moving pictures are involved. These can be very short stories or long special reports. There are still a few occasions in TV news when no illustration is possible, so some stories must be written for a presenter ‘in vision’, addressing the camera directly throughout. Different news organisations use different jargon for the various types of story. In broad terms, the following are the different kinds of TV story a journalist may be required to write.
• Vision story – the studio presenter is in vision with no illustration.
• Vision/inset – the presenter is in vision, but with a caption electronically inset.
• Vision/plasma – the presenter is in vision, with a caption or relevant moving pictures on a plasma screen in the studio.
• Vision/still – the presenter begins the short story in vision and then talks behind a full-screen ‘still’ or caption.
• Vision/OOV – the presenter continues reading ‘out of vision’ as moving pictures are shown.
• Wipe-story – a sequence of short, illustrated stories, with the presenter reading live out of vision, and the director ‘wiping’ from one story to the next. These short sequences are sometimes called a ‘Nib’ (news in brief) or a ‘Fru’ (Foreign news roundup).
• Package – the bread and butter of TV news programmes for many years, the package is usually written and voiced by the location reporter, but is sometimes written by a specialist correspondent back at base, or a journalist pulling together various picture sources.
More and more frequently, correspondents are integrating all these techniques into a sophisticated studio-based package, where the newsreader will link to the correspondent standing at a video wall with moving graphics, who then links into various video sequences, including more graphics, before handing back to the presenter.
When writing the simpler short stories for OOVs or wipe sequences, it’s a good idea to edit the pictures with a long and steady shot at the end. Before you cut the pictures, you’ll know the producer is expecting a maximum of – say – twenty seconds. So ensure that there is a shot-change at about fifteen seconds, and that the last shot is held at least until about twenty-five seconds. This means there is no danger of the story running out of pictures (a black screen is a serious error in a news programme), and ensures the audience will not be shown a new shot just before the director cuts to another story, which is irritating and leaves a feeling that the story ended prematurely.
It is difficult to over-estimate the need for the script to follow the pictures in TV news. The head of journalism training for the French public television networks, Didier Desormeaux, tells his trainees about a research project in Paris, which showed that during a TV news programme, seventy-five per cent of a typical viewer’s brain concentrates on the pictures, while only twenty-five per cent is attentive to the words being spoken. Research also shows that viewers believe TV news is ‘the news in pictures’. They expect to see the story rather than hear it.
The more arresting or dramatic the pictures are, the less attention the viewer will pay to the commentary. So television journalists are well advised to consider the pictures all the time. The words should not compete with them, but should work with them.
Here are some pieces of advice from successful TV news professionals. Sir David Nicholas, former Editor in Chief, ITN:
Write tightly to the picture!
Karen Coleman, formerly a foreign correspondent in radio and TV:
Television is about pictures. You don’t need a pile of words, especially if you have strong images. There’s a big difference between radio and TV. You should look carefully at the pictures, then choose the words to complement those pictures while telling the story.
Bob Jobbins, former head of news at BBC World Service radio and World TV:
In the best television news programmes, the writing together with the pictures produces the impact. TV writing at its best is really pared down.
Clare Morrow, for many years in charge of journalism at ITV Yorkshire Television:
In TV you are trying to think of words which give complementary information to the pictures, additional information, information that the picture can’t tell you. Less experienced journalists tend to describe what they see. What’s the point? The two forms of communication, pictures and words, should work together but do different jobs.
Tim Orchard, former senior programme editor at BBC TV News: Writing commentary to pictures is a difficult line to tread. Don’t write against the pictures; in other words, don’t write about something while the viewer is seeing something completely different. On the other hand, don’t write a commentary to the pictures which points out the bleedin’ obvious! The secret is finding words which complement the pictures and don’t fight against them.
So what does all this mean in practice? The first clear principle is to associate the words with the pictures, but not describe them. If our report starts with a shot of a tanker on rocks, we do not write, ‘The ship was wrecked on the rocks …’ but ‘The Panamanian tanker was loaded with fifty thousand tons of light crude …’. Shots of the drug squad smashing down the door of a house do not require the commentary to say, ‘The police used sledgehammers to break down the doors …’. Say how many officers were involved, and that this was one of five raids happening simultaneously across the city … TV commentary explains what we see without describing it.
In his book News From No Man’s Land, the BBC correspondent John Simpson expresses it like this:
Good quality television reporting, and there is quite a lot of it nowadays, cannot be done by writing an excellent script alone. The pictures have to be accentuated, their full meaning brought out and enhanced, if the report is to be effective. Sometimes you hear a reporter launching into the purplest of prose, paying no attention to the pictures, and you know that he or she is off on some private planet which has little to do with communicating with the audience.
Simpson goes on to confess that he found it very hard to learn how to write for television news.
As a radio journalist who did a good deal of work for newspapers, it seemed strange not to be describing in words exactly what had happened. By comparison, writing a television news script felt like playing chess in several dimensions. But then television news is more complicated than any other type of journalism. That’s its attraction.
One tip that might help simplify this multi-dimensional chess game is to make sure your commentary helps the viewers to know what they are looking at. This is particularly relevant to locations. On television, many places look much like any other. So don’t be afraid to say, ‘On this industrial estate on the outskirts of Swindon …’ or ‘Here in the mountains to the east of Kabul …’ or ‘Inside the committee room …’.
If a report changes location, make sure the commentary explains the change near the beginning of the new sequence.
The ACAS talks resume tomorrow with union leaders expressing confidence that a deal will be done … [switch visual location from outside ACAS to car workers] … On assembly track number three at Cowley, the men who make the Mini aren’t so sure ….
For the Republican faithful, this was enough to provoke a ten-minute ovation … [scene change to exterior shot of conference centre with faint sound of cheering from inside] … Outside the conference centre, no sign of demonstrators. Because … [demonstrators behind barrier] … they were penned back here, two blocks away, by two hundred police, well out of sight of delegates, and out of earshot ….
Television commentary often uses words such as ‘this’ and ‘here’ in a way that would not work on radio or in print. In some ways, television commentary can resemble a series of captions to a storyboard or strip-cartoon of pictures.
BBC Breakfast showed pictures of people walking through an airport. They would have been meaningless without the verbal ‘caption’, by which I mean the concise line of commentary, which had no main verb, and would not have worked on radio.
Back in Britain this morning, the lucky ones who managed to get on the last flight out of Kenya.
A Six o’clock News television report on train delays caused by the record temperatures in the summer of 2003 started with a caption-phrase on a good opening shot of railway lines seeming to wobble in the heat haze. ‘The sweltering shimmer across Britain’s railways this afternoon.’
It’s particularly important for the script to identify people. If the picture shows a close-up of one of the main characters in the story, you should identify the person immediately, unless it is someone incredibly well known.
Even fairly unspecific street scenes can work well if the scriptwriting follows the pictures and explains them. Here, John Simpson describes Belgrade preparing for a night of NATO bombing in 1999. He was working under restrictions, so the range of available pictures was quite limited.
The all-clear siren sounds, for the time being. By now, it’s after five, the time when Belgrade starts to change. The café culture is over for the day. Now people make tracks for home. And the illusion that life is normal begins to fade. The trams stop running at eight o’clock. This is the last one. As the evening wears on, Belgrade becomes a different, more frightening place. The uncertainties and fears grow stronger. No one knows what the night will bring …
The siren, shots of empty cafés, people scurrying through the streets, a tram, frightened faces, are all used precisely. Notice the chronology. And notice how short the sentences are – a Simpson trademark style when he is trying to convey tension.
Brian Hanrahan has always been particularly adept at writing to the available pictures. He also reported for the BBC on the Balkan wars. During a tense period of political manoeuvring in Belgrade, with media access to the talks denied, the only shots available were of the restaurant at the front of the national parliament building.
Most politics in Yugoslavia goes on behind closed doors. It takes a crisis to force them ajar and give the public a glimpse of what the politicians are doing. And with more parties in parliament than tables in the dining room, it’s an opportunity for endless intrigue.
Sometimes library pictures have to be used because there are no new shots to illustrate the subject. Even then, they should not be used as wallpaper.
The commentary should try to use the strength of the images. When the BBC’s Ben Brown reported on the arguments over equal opportunities legislation and the Army’s recruitment policy, he had to use library shots of soldiers in action. A clause at the end of the first sentence relates them to the story.
Every single member of the British armed forces must be fit enough to fight on the front line, according to Sir Charles Guthrie, as fit as these soldiers in the Gulf for example. Sir Charles believes that allowing the disabled to join up could threaten Britain’s very ability to wage war …
It’s good practice to refer to library pictures in the commentary, rather than rely only on a fleeting caption on the screen. For example, library pictures of Russian troops pouring in to South Ossetia at the start of the short war with Georgia in August 2008 might well have a caption saying ‘South Ossetia, August 2008’, but it is helpful to the viewer if the commentary also says, ‘When ten thousand Russian troops entered South Ossetia to engage the Georgian army on the ninth of August 2008 …’. Otherwise the viewers will be trying to read the caption, while looking at the interesting pictures, and listening to the reporter telling them something else. Good commentary always helps viewers know what they are looking at by steering them through the visual narrative.
The present tense is used a great deal in broadcast journalism, usually to describe situations rather than specific actions or events: ‘The refugees are desperate. Mrs Aziz says she can’t remember how long she’s been here.’ And it can be used for what people have said recently: ‘Mr Clegg says that’s a deliberate misreading of the coalition policy …’ rather than ‘Mr Clegg said it was …’.
On television, it is sometimes possible to use the present tense to relate events that have already happened. I guess this is because there is a strong sense of immediacy for the viewers as the pictures unfold. Present-tense narrative has the effect of injecting more drama, so it should be used sparingly, and when the story really does qualify as dramatic. Here the BBC’s David Shukman reports on a Tornado mission over Serbia.
This is where the air war starts. A two thousand pound bomb, the largest the RAF has, is loaded into an RAF Tornado in Germany. These weapons are meant to break the Serbian military and force Mr Milosevic to the peace table. The planes begin their mission – two men in each – six bombers in all – many other aircraft in support. The sight is formidable, but so are the complications …
Once again, we can note the chronological narrative unfolding, and the use of very short sentences and phrases.
The struggle to relate the words to the image on screen has led many TV reporters to use a play-on-words to find the connection. It’s particularly popular at the regional television level, where stories are not always tragic or dramatic, or when rather dull visuals require ingenuity in the commentary to make them interesting. This is risky territory. It is difficult to write useful guidance on this because it is so subjective.
Personally, I like subtle pointers to the pictures in the choice of words. At its simplest, we could write, ‘It was a dazzling entrance …’ as we see the film star flinching from the flash bulbs, or ‘City analysts expect the Chancellor to box clever …’ as we see him holding up the red box on budget day. I enjoyed the last line of a regional television report about a multi-storey at Stratford-upon-Avon winning the Car Park of the Year Award: ‘The pay and display’s the thing!’
The BBC’s Martin Bell reported on a British poet winning a top literary prize in the USA, and wrote his television commentary in rhyming couplets. His delivery was so measured that hardly anyone noticed.
But the joke or pun can easily be a groaning distraction. You might just get away with, ‘It was a hairy moment …’ as David Beckham emerged from the hairdressers in plaits to face the press, because it’s a fun story. But I urge all readers of this book to resist puns, particularly in animal stories. They’ve all been done already, and amuse only the very young, the very old, or the very indiscriminating. Banish from your mind any thought of ‘barking up the wrong tree’ or ‘thereby hangs a tale’ in doggy stories.
How about this from a regional TV company, which I will not name out of charity. It’s the end of a short package about the top cockerel at the agricultural show.
And while the prizes might be poultry, this cock of the north is hoping he can pullet off.
At this point, the cockerel was seen attacking the reporter. Thousands of viewers were urging him on. The serious point is that puns in television commentaries have to be very good ones if they are going to work for most viewers. They tend not to work in serious reports. A play-on-words is seldom the best way to relate pictures to the script.
There’s nothing to [subediting] really … it’s just a matter of checking the facts and spelling, crossing out the first sentence, and removing any attempts at jokes.
(Michael Frayn, Towards the End of the Morning)
A student of broadcast journalism might be forgiven for thinking that the domain of television is pictures, and the realm of radio is sound. Curiously, sound plays as important a role in television news as it does in radio news. Some would argue it is even more important on TV. This is because the staple diet of radio news is the concise voice-piece or despatch from the reporter – the voice only, with no real sound. The short radio package may include interview clips, but not much atmospheric sound.
Television news, on the other hand, has a staple diet of packages composed of sequences of moving pictures, and these picture sequences are not silent. They carry real sound with the images throughout.
‘Natural sound’ is sometimes called ‘actuality’, ‘real sound’ or ‘international sound’. Whatever you call it, good natural sound is essential for good television packages. It brings reality to television. We do not live in a silent world. The TV screen is two-dimensional. The sound gives depth to the picture. It’s the third dimension of a rounded reality.
For television news professionals, sound has always posed particular challenges. In the past, it was difficult and expensive to record sound on location. That’s why the early cinema newsreels, Pathé and Movietone, for example, put music on all their reports. The stories had been filmed largely with silent Bolex cameras. The film was ‘mute’. Edited with commentary alone, it sounded flat. So expert music-finders were employed to provide appropriate non-copyright music, joyful and happy for the Queen at Ascot, doom-laden and threatening for war in the Balkans.
In the digital age, all cameras record good quality sound on at least two soundtracks. Yet some journalists refuse to acknowledge how important the sound is. Some view their pictures at high speed, which means they cannot hear any good sound. And many produce ‘block-scripts’ or ‘wall-to-wall scripts’, which give no opportunity for the viewer to hear the real sound or capture the atmosphere.
Ian Masters, for many years the Controller of Broadcasting at the Cardiff-based Thomson Foundation, trained broadcast journalists around the world. He regards the lack of real sound as one of the most common faults in TV news package-making.
Journalists should not write ‘wall to wall’ and never write over gripping sound. I remember watching a news piece on the last steam locomotive journey in an overseas country. The cameraman produced a fantastic set of pictures with wonderful hissing and sounds of steam belching. The journalist dipped the sound on the lot and wrote over everything. The emotive sounds of the steam engine would have said more than the yapping journalist.
The best journalists, camera-operators and picture-editors listen for good sound all the time. Writing the script for a TV package should always take account of the need to pause briefly for the sound to be clearly audible. This is called, in broadcasting jargon, ‘letting it breathe’. Don’t try to write block script across pictures of football fans singing, a police car roaring past with sirens blaring, a caged tiger leaping at the bars with a roar, the baby gurgling at the camera, the applause, the laughter, the aircraft talking off from the carrier, the roof coming off in the hurricane – in fact, anything captured on camera that needs no words – at least for a few seconds.
Lyse Doucet:
Sometimes pictures don’t need words. Let them breathe. Let people take in the full impact. Don’t feel you must keep talking. It will only distract.
Clare Morrow:
Commentary should come after the pictures are edited. This also allows you to hear the natural sound, and adjust the words to make it come through. You may not have noticed it on location. Natural sound makes the viewers feel they are there!
Sir David Nicholas:
A great stylistic requirement in my old company, ITN, was that you used natural sound mixed up with the script as much as possible. If someone wrote a script which squeezed out some very effective sound, my old editor would jump on you from a great height.
Natural sound is often most effective when the report changes locations. For example, if the scene moves from a quiet upland sheep farm in Shropshire to the weekly market in Shrewsbury, the commentary script should pause for two or three seconds at the start of the first shot of the market, so that the viewer can hear the general hubbub, or the sheep baaing as they are herded in to the pens. Picture editors look and listen for ‘edit-points’ when they can move the action along or change location. A classic edit point is a door closing. Whether it’s a car door or a classroom door, the bang or click allows the picture editor to cut effortlessly to a different location. But the picture-editor’s craftwork is time wasted if the journalist writes an essay all over the natural sound.
Viewers of television news can see three basic types of image on their screen. They can see the news studio; the outside world (either on live location shots or, more often, recorded on tape or memory-card); and graphics. These graphics are electronically inserted images, designed to help the communication process. They can be name-captions (generally known as ‘supers’, short for superimpositions), maps, still pictures, animations, key quotes, key numbers, bullet points, charts, graphs, currency exchanges, sport results, or weather captions.
Up to the late ’70s, graphics in British TV news were hard to handle. They had to be hand-produced by artists sitting at large drawing boards in the newsroom, and shown on screen by pointing studio cameras at them. Even simple name-supers were printed on to black cards and placed before a camera in a purpose-built caption-scanner. Computer-based electronic graphics, which developed in the ’80s, were fabulous in comparison. They were sharp, three-dimensional and capable of animation. Since then, electronic graphics devices have become dazzling in their capability, and they have become cheaper.
Yet many news programmes around the world still do not use graphics very much. Editors say they are too expensive, or too time-consuming, or both. I believe that some television journalists are afraid of using graphics. They don’t know how to make them work well. They think graphics spell trouble and waste time, and they find it much easier to cut a TV package without worrying about inserting graphics.
Broadcasters in the UK are generally more ambitious in the use of graphics than their counterparts in the rest of Europe. The BBC, ITN, Sky News and the regional companies use graphics a great deal. They are used for a number of reasons:
• to identify speakers and library pictures, or places via a map
• to clarify information, particularly when numbers are involved
• to explain complicated stories
• to emphasise the main points of a report or a statement
• to illustrate when no pictures are possible, for example in a court case, or if the only way of receiving a report or conducting an interview is on the phone
• to indicate a change of subject visually, usually as an inset or screen-graphic next to the presenter.
Graphics also help to give the programme style, through their typeface, colours and general design, which will be chosen to match the opening titles and the studio set. And they provide visual variety, which keeps the viewers’ attention.
The simplest form of graphic is a full-screen caption, such as a chart of football results, currency changes, or the main points of a government bill. In recent years, graphics have become more and more integrated with television’s moving images. The latest computer systems allow movement within the graphic, such as swirling backgrounds, zooms to highlight locations, or animated lettering. And now the reporter and the graphic can be integrated visually. Many graphics are shown on one side of the screen with the presenter in the studio, or reporter on location, also in shot. Sometimes a specialist correspondent will stand in the studio beside a plasma screen and explain the background to a story with the aid of a series of carefully produced graphics, which include some moving pictures. And sometimes the reporter on location will be filmed on one side of the screen so that graphics can be inserted alongside. Television weather forecasts have used this technique for several years, to take the presenter out of the studio and into the real world, with its real weather.
Whether graphics are used full-screen or integrated with other images, the principles of writing the script remain the same. Remember that the moment you present a graphic on to the screen, the viewers will look at it! So the script must immediately help them to interpret it or to read the words.
The reason we throw a graphic on to the screen is to make it easier for the viewer to understand our story. If we show words or numbers on the screen, we are inviting the viewers to read them. And if they are going to read them, in just a few seconds, we cannot expect them to listen to something completely different at the same time. This logic leads to some clear rules for writing to graphics.
• Don’t put too many words on the screen at the same time. Information on graphics should be taken in very quickly, almost at a glance. A screen full of text is almost impossible to read. Most viewers will not bother to try. 139Different techniques for radio and television
• Make sure the visual effects are not too distracting. Swirling backgrounds, which make it difficult to read the words or numbers, are counter-productive.
• The words in the script must precisely match the words on the caption (in much the same way that a graphic shown with a newsreader’s intro must match the words closely, as outlined earlier). It’s not good enough to show a caption reading … ‘19% of secondary school children have played truant’ and write a script that says, ‘According to the survey, [caption] nearly one in five children over the age of eleven have skipped school in the past two years’. The information is broadly the same, but it is far too difficult for a viewer to try to read the caption and listen to different words at the same time. And a list of sport results should be scripted in precisely the order they appear on the screen.
• The caption must be on the screen long enough for the audience to read and understand it. Even a short caption-statement like the example above (19% of secondary school children have played truant), which would take three to four seconds to read aloud, should be on screen for at least seven seconds. So the accompanying script should have an extra phrase at the end, so that the caption does not disappear too quickly. For example:
(Commentary behind pictures) | ‘Last year’s truancy initiative seems to be having little impact … |
(Caption: 19% of secondary school children played truant) | According to the survey, nineteen per cent of secondary school children have played truant at some time in the past year. The Minister says something must be done.’ |
(Pictures continue). | (Interview clip with Minister). |
As a footnote on writing to graphics, it is worth emphasising that this is the one part of broadcast journalism where spelling really matters (apart from the need to spell accurately if you are required to deliver a version of your story to the station website). One careless mistake on a television graphic looks ghastly. It will be noticed by thousands, maybe millions, and severely damage the reputation of the journalism. So check and double-check that your graphics are correct.
It is very useful to have a good dictionary and an atlas to hand. This may seem obvious, but I have been in newsrooms that did not have them. Nor do some newsrooms have their own spelling guide for graphics. Any credible news organisation needs to be consistent. For example, Al Qaeda can be spelt in English at least twelve different ways. On your caption, should it be al-qaida, or Al Qa’ida or Al Qaida? Is it Colonel Gaddafi or Ghaddafi? You don’t want to waste time trawling the internet to find out. I think all television news graphics areas should have a copy of a style guide from a quality newspaper, such as The Times Guide to English Style and Usage, which is full of recommendations on spellings and punctuation.
Probably the most common error on television graphics involves the infamous apostrophe. Its misuse drives normally placid folk into a frenzy of letter-writing to the papers. There is even an Apostrophe Protection Society, and a rival Society for the Prevention of Apostrophe Misuse (SPAM). It seems that more and more people are leaving school confused by this small punctuation tick. We have probably all seen shop signs, some of them expensively printed, that use apostrophes on simple plurals: Best Sausage’s, Kitchen’s and Bathroom’s, even the baffling Xma’s Tree’s.
I’m confident that no professional journalist could produce such howlers on simple plurals. But bear in mind that ‘people in their 90s’ is a simple plural. ‘The 1990s’ is also plural. But an apostrophe appears in ‘the ’90s’ to show we’ve dropped something.
I’m less confident about the potential confusion between forms of the possessive. Remember that the apostrophe comes after the letter ‘s’ for plural possessives; so ‘the board member’s decision’ refers to one board member, and ‘the board members’ decision’ refers to more than one. If the plural form of the word does not end with the letter ‘s’, the apostrophe treats the word like a singular, for example ‘children’s books’.
But the possessive ‘its’ has no apostrophe at all. ‘The board took its decision.’ The apostrophe in ‘it’s’ denotes that a letter is missing: it means ‘it is’. So ‘the board took it’s decision’ is wrong. It’s not it’s, it’s its.
So what do all these principles of writing television news mean in practice? Here’s an example of a full-length TV news package, which illustrates many of the above points. It was a report from Uganda shown on the BBC main evening news a few years ago. Though the location may be a little more colourful than many in the UK, the package did not have any dramatic events in it. In fact the story was little more than a situation-report. The background is quite interesting.
BBC News was becoming concerned that television coverage of Africa tended to show only wars, famines, abuses of civil rights and disease. The whole continent was in danger of being stereotyped. So when the International Monetary Fund was preparing to decide on extensions of huge loans to two former British colonies, one of them Uganda, it was decided that Business Correspondent Peter Morgan should make a quick and relatively cheap trip to both countries, to explain the situation on the ground. His special reports were shown on successive nights and were about three minutes long.
But how do you film the Ugandan economy? It would have been relatively easy to write a short essay about the progress the country had made during a period of relative stability, and cover it with pictures of Ugandans at work. But that would not have been good television news.
Intro. | |
(Newsreader in vision). | The world’s poorest nations have been told to do more to end corruption and to encourage free trade. In return, the International Monetary Fund is offering them more help to relieve their debts. |
Graphic animation zooming in on Uganda (Newsreader OOV) | So far the only country in Africa to qualify for extra help is Uganda, where a period of stable government has led to an economic revival. |
Graphic (economic growth and inflation figures) | In the past five years, the economy has grown by forty-five per cent, while inflation has fallen from two hundred and forty per cent to seven per cent now. |
Graphic animation (picture of Peter Morgan) | In the first of two special reports, our International Business Correspondent Peter Morgan looks at Uganda’s journey from basket case to role model for Africa. |
Package | |
Early morning tea picking | (Sound of tea picking) A new dawn. In war-torn, famine-cursed, Aids-ravaged Africa. In Uganda – for decades plundered by the cruellest dictators of a savage continent – today they’re picking PG Tips. |
Tea processing shed. First shot is a sack thrown towards camera. | (Sound of sack landing in front of lens). This plantation, deserted during twenty years of anarchy, has now been brought back into production by a British company which can prosper as long as peace lasts. |
Interview Harry Percy, tea planter | ‘The soils and the climate are good enough to produce yields and quality of tea that are the equal of anywhere in the world. But it is no good unless you’ve also got security. For years that wasn’t available here. Now it is and we’re really making progress.’ |
Busy street scenes in Kampala. First shot is stylish women in dark glasses. | In Uganda’s capital Kampala, designer shades abound. Twelve years of peace and a kind of democracy have allowed commerce to flourish. |
Interior greenhouse growing roses. First shot is close up of rose being snipped. Interview Vincent Senyonjo, rose grower. | (Sound of snip) New industries are taking root, so close to the equator roses bloom seven times each year. These flowers are being sold in Europe in ever growing numbers. ‘Oh yeah - for the next five years we are very confident that the prosperity will continue and we estimate that by the year two thousand we shall have five hundred acres of flowers.’ |
Kampala’s outdoor market, with close-ups of money changing hands. | (Noise of market) Uganda has been growing three times as fast as Britain for a decade. It’s brought down inflation by adopting the rigid policies of the International Monetary Fund, privatising industry and cutting government spending. But not everyone is happy. |
Metal security gates being unloaded from a lorry | (The clang of the gates on the ground) Uganda’s new rich are buying security gates to keep out the poor. The benefits of economic revival have not been evenly spread. |
Vox pop lorry driver with gates | ‘The poor man is getting poorer, and the rich man is getting richer and richer.’ |
Parliament building. Shots of Vice-President being introduced to Morgan. | Uganda has a parliament, but opposition parties are banned. Its Vice-President, and incidentally Africa’s most powerful woman, rejects persistent criticism that this no-party state, or ‘movement system’ as she prefers, encourages competition. |
Interview Dr. Wandira Kazibwe, Vice-President. | ‘You know I don’t believe that a system is corrupt. Individuals are corrupt, whether they are in the Movement System or in the Multi-Party System.’ |
Children in school singing and clapping. | (Sound of kids singing) Yet for these children to inherit a genuinely developed country there’s so much to do. Though some debts have been written off, Uganda still spends more repaying loans than it does on education. Two thirds still live in absolute poverty. |
Workers clearing jungle on tea plantation. | (Sound of machetes hacking the jungle) Back on the tea plantations they’re hacking undergrowth, extending cultivation. But here you’re just a rifle shot away from the warring Democratic Republic of Congo; Rwanda lies just to the south. |
Morgan piece to camera with workers clearing jungle behind him. | ‘Ugandans are working hard to impose order on chaos in the very heart of Africa. But too much war on their borders and too little democracy at home mean their achievements, however impressive, remain extremely fragile. Peter Morgan, BBC News, in Kasaru Western Uganda.’ |
It’s a fairly routine feature-package, but was an effective one, because it was carefully constructed and written.
The structure followed familiar patterns by starting at dawn and progressing through a busy day, taking us on a journey from the plantation, to the tea-processing sheds, into the capital, to a rose-growing business, to the market area, to the government building, to a school, and back to the plantation for the final sequence.
Each new location was signalled with about three seconds of good natural sound, with the commentary pausing each time to allow the atmosphere to be heard. This is what is meant by ‘letting it breathe’.
The script, while a little more discursive than the very short sentences that are often used in hard news stories, is still very succinct. And it works well because it refers very closely to the pictures throughout. It’s a neat idea to show schoolchildren when talking about the future, and the script connects them directly to the economic outlook by referring to their inheritance, and uses education spending to explain the size of the debt-burden. There is even a subtle play on words. The reporter chooses to say that new industries are ‘taking root’ rather than ‘appearing’ or ‘opening up’, because we are seeing rows of flowers. The final images of jungle clearance symbolise the economic point in the final summary, ‘Ugandans are working hard to impose order on chaos in the very heart of Africa.’
Most news programmes begin by headlining the main stories. Some give viewers a reminder of the main stories half-way through, or just before the commercial break, so-called ‘half-way-heads’, which are often followed by a taster of what is still to come in the programme. Some programmes use ‘closing heads’ at the end of the programme.
The first few seconds of a news programme are very important, and can be quite complicated to produce. The programme editors take a keen interest in the headlines, often writing them personally with suggestions from the presenter. But other journalists in the newsroom frequently will be asked to ‘write the heads’, or at the very least to suggest a headline for the main stories they are working on.
Writing headlines isn’t easy. Newspapers employ experienced senior sub-editors who specialise in this particularly succinct form of writing news. In broadcasting, headlines cause endless arguments, particularly in television.
Radio headlines tend to be concise summaries of the main development. Television editors are looking for the key images of the day, as well as the right words. So good TV headline writing relates the words directly and immediately to an interesting picture.
It’s worth considering briefly why we have headlines at the beginning of news programmes. Some argue that we must have some kind of menu to tell the audience what’s in the programme. But why? Newspapers don’t have a list of five headlines in the same large typeface down the centre of the front page. And there is some evidence that headlines encourage people not to watch or listen!
The long-established American television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, have been in fierce competition for viewers over many years, and have often scheduled their early evening news programmes directly against each other. They had always carried three or four headlines at the start of each programme, until a few years ago ABC broke with tradition. After a very short animating logo, the programme went directly into the first story. The decision startled their rivals. Why no headlines?
The reason was that ABC executives had noticed from audience research a proportion of their viewers turning on the prime-time news, then switching channels immediately after the headlines. This was bad news for the ratings. It was clear that some people were checking the news headlines to reassure themselves that nothing of huge importance had happened, then switching back to the sport, movie or game show. ABC had decided not to give the viewers that switch-over point. If viewers wanted the day’s news, they would have to stay tuned. Within weeks, CBS and NBC had followed suit. Since then, headlines have made a comeback on all networks, but they are used more flexibly. On nights when there is clearly a big first story, that is sometimes covered in full first, to be followed by a menu or headlines of the rest of the news. And, these days, the headlines are written much more carefully, to try to keep people tuned.
Television headlines are not a news summary. They don’t have to try to tell the whole story in a few seconds. They are an invitation to watch the news programme, and should be written in an inviting style. The difficult decision for broadcasters is whether we abandon those firm principles of writing good conversational English when it comes to the headlines. We don’t tend to talk to each other in news headlines. Imagine coming into the house and informing your partner, ‘School run snarl-up; hundreds delayed by traffic lights on the blink …; Bargains galore as Marks and Sparks mark everything down …; And why Mrs Brown snubbed the games mistress.’
Yet this kind of headline style is a widely accepted convention in broadcast news, providing opportunities for some very succinct writing, and some witty phraseology. Alliteration and rhyme can work quite well. For example, BBC Breakfast used a picture of an elderly woman eating breakfast muffled up in her coat and hat, with the headline:
Millions in debt. Why so many people must choose between eating and heating.
This ‘Why’ formula is a useful device for indicating a subject and telling the audience they’ll find out more later – if they stay tuned. A main verb often isn’t necessary, especially for a short first sentence or phrase.
More misery for rail travellers – now many face two months without trains …
Turn away from the Taliban – the new American plan to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan …
And blowing a fuse – why it all went black in Blackpool
The inviting style of headline also reduces the danger of the headline words being repeated in the first line of the story intro. The headline and the intro to a story should always be written in a complementary way, without direct repetition.
It’s a fine dividing line between a good, sharp headline and an awful piece of journalese. Headlines are fertile ground for the cliché. The requirement to write very succinctly, and with some impact, draws some writers to the monosyllables we see every day in newspaper headlines: rap for reprimand, bid for attempt, clash for disagreement, slam for attack. ‘Chancellor set to curb spending’ (Five News) is not spoken English. ‘Germany’s unemployment crisis deepens as elections loom’ (BBC World) seems over-dramatically doom-laden. Can elections loom? ‘Three die in M6 fog smash’ (ITV Central News) has abandoned any notion that the presenter is telling the news to individual viewers; he is apparently reading aloud a newspaper headline. I also dislike this use of the present tense when people have been killed or injured. Describing a specific act that has taken place by using the present tense – ‘Baby dies as fire rips through block of flats’, ‘Six are hurt as scaffolding collapses’ – is not at all the way we speak, and dramatises tragic events in an insensitive away.
My personal view is that journalists should try hard to write headlines that sound natural, refusing to use journalese, and refusing to drop the definite article. In radio this is a little easier than in television. Research shows there is much less channel-hopping on radio than TV. Listeners to a radio news programme are more likely to listen to it all. So the need to be especially brief and intriguing isn’t quite so pressing as in the ruthlessly competitive world of television. And in radio, the obstacle of matching words to pictures is removed, leaving all the headline options available to the journalist. Television headlines are more like captions to pictures, and will inevitably use less natural language, sometimes using phrases without verbs: ‘Oxbridge out of fashion – fees up, applications down’. But this is far removed from using tabloid vocabulary and clichés.
The BBC training department has collected a few embarrassing headlines over the years, and urges its journalists to double-check that there can be no double meanings, such as ‘Byers accused of lying on Railtrack’, ‘Safety experts say school bus passengers should be belted’, ‘Grandmother of eight makes hole in one’, ‘Prostitutes appeal to Pope’. But surely ‘How do you solve a problem like Korea?’ is pretty brilliant?
TV headlines vary in length depending on the style of the individual programme, but they are usually around four to seven seconds long. Some programmes that favour a very fast pace cut the headline pictures to three seconds each. This puts the headlines on the edge of comprehensibility for many viewers. Certainly, anything shorter than this will take the picture away before the audience has had a fair chance to see it. The best pictures for TV headlines are simple and bold. If you are going to talk about a person, make sure it is a good single shot, in close-up if possible. Steady shots from a camera on a tripod work well in headlines, so that the image moves inside a fixed frame. Mixing or wiping between four different five-second shots will become a visual whirl if the camera is moving in a different direction on each shot.
The number of headlines depends on the length of the programme and its individual style. But most TV editors would agree that two headlines doesn’t feel right, neither promoting the main story of the day on its own, nor giving the viewers an adequate menu. Six or seven headlines (the norm in some central European countries) seem to me to be too many, and turn the opening sequence into a full news summary before the real news programme starts. For half-hour news programmes in the UK, four headlines has become fairly standard.
If the headlines are to use a clip of natural sound, it must be very short and very clear. On days with a dominant main story, the first two or three headlines might well cover different angles of the big story.
Quite a lot of TV news programmes, especially breakfast programmes and regional news programmes, which use features as well as hard news, will split their headlines. The day’s dominant story or the main top stories will be the hard news, with crisp, visual headlines, then there will be a studio link from the presenters along the lines of ‘… and also in tonight’s programme …’, then there will be one or two human-interest headlines designed to keep people tuned throughout the programme.
Good news programme editors and presenters try to make their headlines irresistible and stylish. They are, in effect, a mini-production in themselves, particularly on television. Using some natural sound is becoming the norm. Here’s a typical example of headlines on a day with no really outstanding story. It comes from the BBC News at Six in February 2010.
Presenter in vision: | The right to die. A best-selling author calls for a special panel to decide who should be helped to take their own life. |
Pictures of Pratchett | Terry Pratchett, who has Alzheimer’s, wants assisted suicide made legal. |
Clip of Pratchett interview | ‘If someone of their own volition wishes to die, it’s in society’s interest to allow them to do it as peacefully as possible.’ |
Presenter in vision: | Also on tonight’s programme … |
Still picture of victim | The young mental health worker killed on a home visit – her employer admits she should never have been sent alone. |
Pictures of students | More applicants less cash. English universities say hundreds of thousands could lose out on places after government cuts. |
Sliding cars on icy roads | And new figures suggest we’ve slithered and skidded through one of the coldest winters ever. |
The BBC’s College of Journalism website has an interesting video showing the editor, senior journalists, and the presenter Huw Edwards discussing options for the headlines for the Ten o’clock News, then Edwards writing the script. Here he describes the essence of TV headline-writing, and emphasises how important it is to get it right.
Headlines must make people sit up. The main purpose is to convey the main essence of a story – and make the viewer want to know more. The first thing to do is select the four or five stories which will offer the viewer a good mix. Each viewer should see something that will hook them. Decide the facts that must go into the top line, and clearly the available pictures help make the decision. The words must work with the pictures precisely. A simple, concise style is always best – you don’t always need complete sentences. But watch out for legal problems and balance because it has to be so short. It’s good to use clips of people speaking in the headlines – usually well-known people, and the clip must be concise and clear. Headlines must never be boring but must never sensationalise.
Closing headlines are different, and should be written differently. They are not an inducement to watch or listen. The main reason to recap the main headlines at the end of the programme is to capture the viewers and listeners who tune in after the start of the programme, because they know the closing headlines will give them the top stories they’ve missed. Figures show that about one in four viewers of a typical early evening television news programme tune in after it has started. The closing headlines also remind the rest of the audience of the main story, giving the programme a sense of ordered priories, a clear structure, and a strong finish.
The closing headlines also provide an opportunity to update the main story. It is unsatisfactory to repeat the words of the opening headlines. Try to refresh the phraseology. A neat headline like, ‘Where were the gritters? Were councils caught out by the cold snap?’ would be an irritation if repeated at the end of the programme, and should be replaced: ‘Councils have blamed the Met Office for failing to issue an ice-warning in time for them to get out the gritters.’
And if the programme style is to give the main three stories at the end of the programme, I recommend that they are written in their natural order, with the lead story first. On some radio stations there has been a fashion to write the closing headlines in reverse order, ending with a flourish on … and tonight’s main story …. I don’t think this works very well because it forces the presenter to begin the closing headlines with a down-bulletin story, which is editorially curious and confusing for the listeners.
In recent years, there’s been a rapid growth in the number of continuous news or 24-hour news television channels across Europe. British viewers with digital reception can now pick up the BBC News channel, CNBC, Bloomberg TV, as well as the pioneers of the genre, CNN and Sky News. Internationally, BBC World News has grown a substantial audience, Euronews has the biggest audience in Europe for an international news channel, and Deutsche Welle TV and France 24 are just two of many overseas broadcasters providing an English language service.
There are also more radio channels. As digital radio receivers become more affordable, there will be many more. While music stations still have the biggest audiences, talk radio has a solid share of the market, both nationally and locally. In Britain, the news and sport station BBC Five Live has been voted station of the year more than once. Since the ’80s, BBC local radio has become an overwhelmingly speech-based service, with long sequences of live news, information and current affairs at key times of the day.
Producing news stories for these news-based stations and channels is particularly demanding, especially for television. Scriptwriting is often done under great time pressure, and each script should be particularly conversational to match the informal and dynamic style of rolling news. In fact, quite a lot of the news on 24-hour channels isn’t written at all, because new technology now permits so much location reporting and interviewing to be live.
Rob Kirk, Editorial Development Manager at Sky News:
Twenty-four hour news is insatiable. It has a remorseless appetite for live broadcasting, on the hour every hour, sometimes more. This tests a correspondent’s ability to find the right words – under tremendous pressure – to the utmost. It’s a particular skill.
Julie Etchingham, Presenter, Sky News:
The programme segment I work on consists of almost all live material with very few packages. Therefore scripts are quickly becoming a thing of the past, as you ad lib to the next interview. Anything that is written beforehand needs to be snappy and to the point, to fit in with the pace of the programme.
Sir David Nicholas:
The new dimension in broadcasting these days perhaps doesn’t involve writing at all. Because so much now is ad lib live coverage, including court reports and parliamentary debates. So there is a requirement for a new skill which was not so important in my day; that’s to be able to be able to speak tightly, coherently, logically and fluently. There’s so much continuous news and live location broadcasting. It’s a new skill, and I think on the whole the younger reporters are very good at it.
On location, the report might be a live but ‘straight’ account of the story. It might well be a ‘two-way’, with the studio presenter interviewing the journalist. It might be a live link into a recorded package, followed by a live interview with one or two people on location before a hand-back to the studio. And these live sequences are allocated a duration by the producer, and are expected to finish exactly on time.
It’s a little easier on radio. The reporter can hold a script, or at least a sheet of notes, to help get the facts and structure right. I would advise brief notes in the hand, rather than a detailed script, because the immediacy of live broadcasting is audible. Reading out a script loses the spontaneity. To be precise, I would advocate notes on postcard-sized cards rather than A4 sheets of paper, which are inclined to rustle and flap about in the breeze. File-cards are easier to handle, especially when you have a microphone in your hand.
In television, you really do not want to be seen referring to notes. The reporter with the microphone in one hand and the clipboard in the other is a very old fashioned image. A clipboard makes you look like an estate agent; a notebook makes you look like a police officer giving evidence. And the modern style is not to stand stiffly to deliver your information, but to ‘walk and talk’, to demonstrate things, and to use hand gestures to emphasise the words. It’s quite hard to do it with a script in your hand. To be honest, it’s quite hard to do without a script in your hand.
Robert Hall has specialised in this kind of live and dynamic location reporting for many years, with ITN and the BBC. He says he rarely writes things down.
There’s no point. I work out what I need to say, and in what order. It’s important to have a walk-through with the camera operator so that we both understand how the sequence will look. If there’s time, we might do this two or three times. But the script is in the head.
Personally, I think there are many television and radio journalists who are brilliant at this kind of natural story-telling. And I know it’s not as effortless as it looks. First, it’s essential to know what the studio presenter will say before handing over to the location reporter, or in a two-way, what the presenter will ask. Secondly, for television reports, it is essential to know in detail what will be in shot, and to rehearse any camera movements. Thirdly, it can be useful to write down a few telling phrases, names or statistics you know you are going to use, and look at them to help the memory. But then put the piece of paper out of sight! Live reporting means that you tell the audience what you know, not recite what you have just memorised.
Back at base in the 24-hour news operation, it’s important for the journalist to make sure the studio presenter has the right information at all times – in the usual scripts, intros, headlines and ‘coming-up’ sequences – but also when there may not be enough time for conventional scriptwriting.
Maxine Mawhinney has been a lead presenter for the BBC News and BBC World News channels for many years, capable of conducting informed interviews on nearly any subject at a moment’s notice, and always staying calm under pressure. She says writing scripts for continuous news requires the same disciplines as writing for bulletins or news programmes, but the main difference is the speed at which scripts have to be produced.
Scripts can’t be agonised over all day as the channel never stops and the information has to be constantly updated. The headlines, quarter-heads and half-heads have to be reviewed all the time as the stories move. As for breaking news, this isn’t scripted. It’s usually ad-libbed by the presenter using agency copy he or she has pulled up on to the computer, or information sent by the gallery producer [in the studio control-room] or the assistant editor in the newsroom. So there is nothing on Autocue and no one writes it, until it finds its way into the running order for the next news update.
So the job of the journalist is to brief presenters, particularly about live interviews coming up, as well as to write scripts. As well as sending messages to the presenter’s computer, notes can sometimes be posted on the teleprompter or written on old-fashioned sheets of paper. A quickly typed sheet, or even a hand-written note (clear writing, large print), saying, for example, how to pronounce the interviewee’s name, how many years she’s been foreign minister, and when she’s going to Washington for the showdown meeting, will be invaluable for a hard-pressed presenter switching between very different stories. Here are some pieces of advice from the BBC World News presenter Lyse Doucet.
Every presenter is different. If news is breaking fast, some presenters can busk it from agency reports and ad lib. Others need more help so they will need more information on the Autocue. If you are working regular shifts in a TV newsroom, try to understand each presenter’s needs. Their job is to look calm in the midst of chaos. Your job is to give them as much clarity as possible, at a time when the situation is often unclear.
If it’s breaking news, and there are only ten lines of the first news agency reports, don’t put all ten lines in the intro. I’ve seen the alarmed look on the correspondent’s face when the presenter reads all the known information and then turns to the correspondent and says, ‘What else can you tell us?’ (Real answer – Nothing.)
Don’t be sloppy. I once had an intro saying twelve people had died from ‘hospital actions’. It should have been ‘hostile actions’. Being fast is no excuse for being inaccurate. Check, check, check. One source of information is usually not enough. Three news agencies quoting the same source doesn’t always count. Attribute all information.
In essence, 24-hour news should embrace the same principles and good practice of any credible news programme. The main differences in writing it are that you must be fast, sometimes be prepared to put the key and verified information in note-form for the presenter, and be ready to speak live on location, with a ‘virtual script’ in your head. It’s interesting to note that continuous news channels, broadcast substantially without scripts, tend to be relatively free of journalese and clichés.