Writing for news

Up until this semester, all the main skills that I have acquired for Journalism have been to do with writing articles for print and a small margin of writing for radio broadcast. Writing for television is entirely different and was a new experience I embarked on this semester.

The major difference between the two mediums is that television writing is more to the point and uses less words than print as we have the images to rely on to emphasise the point not the words.

I found a website called “Tips for basic news writing” which gives tips on how the two mediums differ and how to write effectively for television broadcasts.

The author outlines seven key elements that can make an effective news story these include:

1.       Keep the writing simple

2.       Keep the script short

3.       Make it conversational

4.       Active Voice

5.       Each sentence should have a new idea

6.       Have a strong lead in sentence

7.       Attribution always at the start of a sentence as opposed to print when it’s at the end.

In the news story my partner and I co-wrote for the assessment, we used most of the attributes outlined on the website. However, during the editing process we did cut out unnecessary adjectives that were being used in the script to shorten our video length and make the news story more to the point.

I was proud of the material we produced I feel we adhered to several of these guidelines such as the attribution at the start of sentences, the active voice and the simplicity of the writing to a degree.

Each sentence we used had to emphasise a different point about the centenary campaign and we found we even had to do this when using the footage of our interviewees.

The topic we chose isn’t controversial so with our interviewees we had to make sure each were emphasising a different point about the centenary social media marketing as opposed to them both on different sides of an argument.

I think our piece to camera was a bit long winded and could have been cut down; I will work on this next time and follow the guidelines on this website so I produce a higher quality of work.

I also believe at the beginning of our video we didn’t have a very strong lead in sentence, the news story just suddenly begins, this needs to be worked on for next time as well.

For tips on how to write for television visit this link:

http://journalism.about.com/od/writing/a/broadcast.htm