Media Skills 2014: Week 7

1. Media Skills 2014!
Week 7: Writing For TV and Radio
!
!
Dr Kane Hopkins

2. Television

3. 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).

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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’?

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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.

11. 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)

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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!)

15. 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)

16. 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.

17. Radio

18. 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

19. 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.

20. 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!

21. 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!

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. and we’re done!