Writing online news in a converged environment (radio-TV-print-online) requires general knowledge of broadcast vernacular and writing styles. In general, broadcast news limits news reports to less than three minutes. Reporters seldom talk more than 40 seconds, regardless of whether it’s a live shot or in-studio shot.

Online and broadcast share what I would describe as a distracted audience. Television viewers can easily click the remote, just as online readers have a million other options on their (online) information horizon.

Writing for online should follow three rules, according to SFSU professor Leonard Sellers:

  • Stories should be one computer screen long. No scrolling, written in chunks.
  • Depth is added by links to graphics, sidebars and multimedia. Links should not be contained in the text.
  • Logical navigation allows the elements to work together.

Taking print or online stories to broadcast (or audio podcasting) requires a strong visual or video element, but there are several tips to help in composing a script.

  • Rely on short, conversational sentences.
  • Begin with summary lede.
  • Active verbs!
  • Pronounciation of proper nouns is important.

Greg Dobbs, longtime network journalist who lives in Denver, says the best way to sound stupid is to pronounce a word the audience knows is wrong.

In building a news script (or a podcast script), Dobbs recommends spelling formal names phonetically, with the syllable meant to be accented in ALL CAPS. In a script, Kabul, Afghanistan would be kah-BOOL. Rockies slugger Clint Barmes would be BAR-mess, not Barmz.

Audio dictionaries are a big help, as are pronounciation guides. When in doubt, make a phone call and find out how the name is pronounced.

Audacity works best for editing audio. It’s free, and is easy to use. Instructions can be found here.

Both audio and video can be embedded using object embed codes. (Remember the object embed code you used, or at least saw, for embedding Flash slide shows?) For audio, a good product for embedding is Wimpy Button.

A good example of the Wimpy mp3 Player can be found at the Denver Post theater section. You can also simply link to audio and video files (uploaded to a server) using an anchor tag, and the browser will handle the rest.

Today’s secret numbers: 48000Hz 16bit and avoiding the “chipmunk effect.”

Posted by Doug Conarroe on Mar 6th, 2008 in Newsroom '08 · Comments Off