Video News Release Writing / Writing for Broadcast Media
A. The basic difference between writing for broadcast and writing for print media is…
1. That copy for broadcast must appeal to the ear.
2. Copy must capture attention through sound and word symbolism.
3. The words must be clear enough to be understandable for the first time through.
4. The listener will not have a chance to review what is said. In radio, the listener
can’t reread a sentence to see what it meant and can’t go back to the one
preceding it to figure out the sequence of ideas. Each offering is a one-time-only
presentation.
5. To compensate for the lack of review opportunity, broadcast writers first tell
listeners and viewers what they are going to tell them, alerting them to the content
by calling up frames of reference. They present the content. Finally in the
summary, they again tell the listener what the message was. It takes a skillful
writer to prepare material in this way without sounding redundant. As the writer
follows this sequence, he or she must keep the time element in mind.
6. Clarity and brevity are both important.
B. Conversational Style
1. Each listener or viewer experiences the broadcast media as an individual and
responds personally.
2. The relaxed style means that the leads or first paragraphs, in broadcast stories are
“soft.” That is, the listener is introduced to the story before hearing it.
C. Other Generalizations about Broadcast Writing:
1. Because the tone is conversational, sentences are sometimes incomplete. We talk
that way, so in broadcast journalism it’s acceptable to write that way.
2. Sentence length and structure are also governed by special rules. In broadcast
writing sentences are kept short in deference to both the announcer (who has a
limited amount of breath) and the listener (who’s attention span is shouldn’t be
taxed).
3. For the same reason, subjects and verbs are kept close together, normally
sentences should not begin with a prepositional phrase – the basic information
should be conveyed first. “According to a report from the Mason County
Sheriff’s office today, vacationers driving through are likely to find fewer service
stations than last year.” By the time listeners decide that fewer service stations
may be important to them, the “Mason County” is lost to all but a few of the most
attentive among them.
D. Broadcast writers should avoid two peculiarities of newspaper style:
1. Inverted sentence structure, where the statement precedes the attribution: “Victims of the
Mississippi tornado are all back in permanent housing, said Scott Smith director of
emergency disaster relief.” This sentence illustrates what NOT to do in writing broadcast
copy. Since broadcast audiences may not be attending to the first part of the sentence,
information should be presented as it would probably be spoken in conversation: “The
director of emergency disaster relief said that all victims of the Mississippi tornado are now
back in permanent housing.” The name of the director isn’t important to the story, so just use
his title. If the story is a long one, in which Smith is quoted, his name would be used, but he
would be identified in a separate sentence: “Scott Smith is the director of emergency relief.”
1
2. Avoid identification of subjects by age, job title and such. In newspapers this information
usually follows the name and is set off by commas. But what is efficient in newspaper copy
becomes cumbersome when read on the air. Again the name of an individual is often
unimportant; title identification is often enough.
E. Preparing Broadcast Copy:
1. All broadcast copy is tripled spaced and written on ONE side of the page. Some
departments prefer that the copy be typed in all caps, others prefer regular format
2. The audio copy for a TV script goes on the right side of the page, opposite the
video instructions. When you are writing for television and using only ½ the
page, set your margins to yield about six words to the line, or about 21 lines per
minute at an average reading speed – the equivalent of 2 seconds per line. Thus, a
30-second story is about 15 lines.
3. To facilitate reading by announcers, don’t break words at the end of lines
4. don’t split sentences between pages.
5. If a word or name is difficult to pronounce, give the proper pronunciation in
parentheses beside it, each time it appears. The announcer should not have to go
back and look for your previous instructions.
6. Do not use dialectical markings you find in dictionaries to indicate proper
pronunciation use popular phonetics in the AP Broadcast News Manual of Style.
7. Remember the audience can’t see punctuation marks, these exist only to help the
announcer interpret the copy. Don’t use them unless they serve this purpose.
8. Don’t use colons, semicolons, percentage signs, dollar signs, fractions.
9. Use commas, periods, question marks, dots, dashes and quotation marks.
10. Use quotation marks only when repeating the exact words is essential. It is better
to rephrase a quote into indirect statements if you can. If you feel that the quote is
necessary, precede it with something like, “In his words,” or “What she asked for
was” or “The statement read”
11. Use hyphens only when you want the letters to be spelled out individually, as in
Y-M-C-A, as opposed to being read as a word, as in NASA.
12. Don’t use abbreviations unless you want them read on the air as abbreviations.
Exceptions are in titles such as Dr. and parts of names like St. Louis. If you don’t
know whether to write a word out or abbreviate it… just write it out.
13. Numbers are difficult to follow when they’re heard and not seen – so avoid using
them as much as possible. When you must, round numbers off and write them out
– for example “one thousand” – then there is no risk of leaving off a digit.
14. Don’t use a.m. or p.m. with times of day, write “this morning” or “tomorrow
night”
15. Also avoid using “per” as in miles per hour, use “miles an hour” instead.
F. When you are preparing your broadcast story:
1. Alert listeners to what you are going to discuss, getting their attention with something that is
important to them.
2. Using a summary statement is a good way to get into the story
3. Then you can give them the essentials
4. Make your sentences simple; don’t use long clauses at the beginning or end or between the
subject or verb.
2
5. As you develop the story, look for ways to connect the paragraphs with transitions that allow
the story to emerge and flow logically
6. Keep the listener and the announcer in mind
7. Think about how each will be able to handle the words you write.
3