Chapter 19

Chapter 19 addressed how to write for Television and Radio. Personally, I'm not really a broadcast person. At all. I feel that print is just more effective and more complete. Each broadcast story only gets about 2 minutes each. How can you truly include all of the information that needs to be included in 2 minutes?

The main difference I saw between writing for print and writing for television and radio was that, with tv and radio, the writing needs to stay short, concise, and conversational. I am generally bad at that. I really do enjoy writing, long, detailed pieces, and I have a slight problem with being "wordy" more often than not. So, all in all, I am fairly certain that television and radio writing is not in my future.

I do have mixed feelings about broadcast, simply because I tend to question how stories are chosen for broadcast. Our book says that stories have to meet certain criteria, one of which is timeliness. Television and radio have the advantage over print of not having certain deadlines and print dates; they can cover things as soon as they happen, and present the stories to the public as soon as they happen. However, the broadcast stories are much more condensed and less complete.

However, there is one aspect of broadcast journalism that I am partial to. The visual aspect is certainly enticing for me, being a photographer. Photo journalism is something that I find very interesting and it is extremely effective. The long and short of it is, images make a stronger impression and can sometimes get across a point better than any words. For example, the photographs of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina that were posted online got more attention than any newspaper articles. The same is true with the coverage of 9/11. The images spoke louder than words, and broadcast not only has the ability to combine words and images, but it also has the ability to use video.

This being said, I still think I'll stick to still photography.