Current Trends in News Coverage on Radio

[boombox4]

A journalism degree is a waste of a college education. Get a liberal arts degree. Learn about people, society, language... Most important, learn to learn. Work at the college newspaper. That will teach you all you need to know about reporting, writing and editing. Work at the student radio station if you want to work in radio to learn about radio.

Are they still emphasizing writing in J-schools? Doesn't seem so. J-schools stopped emphasizing writing when they dropped their focus on print. I see stuff now that should not get a passing grade in a high school English course, let alone a college journalism course.

And the real journalism "schools" are completely gone. United Press International and outfits like City News Bureau of Chicago.

I see lots of sloppy writing in the local paper. Sometimes key news items get buried in the story, often there will be key statistics completely left out of stories; and too often they are trying to write like magazine writers instead of news writers.

I don't know if it's the colleges turning out people who can't write, or aren't really serious about journalism, or if it's a reflection of the general sloppy version of literacy you see in America today.

 

[TheBigA]

Today we have content creators. Content is a nice word for stuff. That's not journalism. That's not writing. It's content.

In order for there to be a market for writing, there has to be a market for reading. That's not really what we have right now. People read, but not in the way they read Hemmingway. So there isn't much of a market for it.

It gets back to doing what you like vs. doing what pays. If you want to do what pays, you probably shouldn't spend a lot of time learning about Hemmingway. But if that's what you love, then hopefully you'll find another way to earn a living, and do the creative writing in your spare time. UPI was a place that was always in financial trouble. Now it's owned by the Unification Church. That says it all.

 

[TheBigA]

This might be relevant to this discussion:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/23/business/media/a-novel-lays-bare-media-ills.html?src=rechp&_r=0

 

[davideduardo]

A journalism degree is a waste of a college education. Get a liberal arts degree. Learn about people, society, language... Most important, learn to learn.

The problem with a liberal arts or humanities degree is that you may learn how to appreciate things, but you do not learn how to do them or make them.

Most college programs in fields that actually make a grad qualified to take a job include a smattering of the appreciation subjects. And learning how to learn comes in any field, not just liberal arts.

Work at the college newspaper. That will teach you all you need to know about reporting, writing and editing.

And they are becoming an anachronism in an era when young people already know campus happenings via tweets, texts and websites. In fact, the student publication I founded 51 years ago has now stopped printing and now is a daily blog.

Work at the student radio station if you want to work in radio to learn about radio.

Very few university stations give student hands on experience any longer.

And the real journalism "schools" are completely gone. United Press International and outfits like City News Bureau of Chicago.

I had UPI in several different operations in various countries in the past (60's to 80's mostly) and our receptionist wrote better than they did. Of course, as BigA says, they were long plagued by revenue shortfalls and management problems.

 

[unitron]

Doing a rip & read newscast was never very difficult..

I dunno, life gets pretty interesting (in the ancient Chinese curse way) when events conspire to hand you the copy, which you have not yet seen, just as you're opening the mic to do the news and you have to edit in your head to fill the time allotted but not run over, in addition to the regular "be reading several words ahead of what you're saying".

And that's with the wire service stuff, which at least has a certain uniformity and predictability.

When it's written "in house", well, that just adds to the excitement.


There was this one time I was reading local copy on air, handed to me at the last second of course, which included a story about a man caught peering into someone's window.

Only the 'r' had been left out of the verb.

 

[JeffM]

.

When it's written "in house", well, that just adds to the excitement


There was this one time I was reading local copy on air, handed to me at the last second of course, which included a story about a man caught peering into someone's window.

Only the 'r' had been left out of the verb.

Sometimes, it's not just the news bulletins. One local TV station here started a whole promo campaign around the slogan "Watch Channel 3 News tonight...Know more tomorrow!" Maybe it looked OK, but read it out loud. (And repent, for the end is near!)

 

[Avid Listener]

I dunno, life gets pretty interesting (in the ancient Chinese curse way) when events conspire to hand you the copy, which you have not yet seen, just as you're opening the mic to do the news and you have to edit in your head to fill the time allotted but not run over, in addition to the regular "be reading several words ahead of what you're saying".

And that's with the wire service stuff, which at least has a certain uniformity and predictability.

When it's written "in house", well, that just adds to the excitement.


There was this one time I was reading local copy on air, handed to me at the last second of course, which included a story about a man caught peering into someone's window.

Only the 'r' had been left out of the verb.

I didn't say it was easy, only that it was never very difficult. Solving differential equations is very difficult. Chinese algebra is very difficult. All of those challenges you mention have a certain degree of difficulty, but I wouldn't elevate them to the status of "very difficult". I'd place them at "sorta difficult" or maybe "somewhat difficult". Writing something about a Kardashian, any Kardashian, that makes her sound like anything other than a vapid, talentless slut is very difficult.

I only worked as a DJ for a very, very brief spell. The station manager where I worked fancied himself an old-school news "personality", who liked to drop folksy ad-libs into his local stories, paraphrased from the local newspaper. The problem is he would write his folksy asides and adlibs into the script, with no punctuation and in all caps. When the morning man had to do his own newscast for the 10:00 AM break, he'd always stumble over the folksy asides. One day, he just gave up and said, "Sorry folks, I can't read this", and moved on to the wire service copy for state and national news. When his shift ended he was fired, and within a week was working at a much better station.

 

[Avid Listener]

Here's an excellent example of the caliber of America's current most respected journalism schools.

Below is a "fair use" extract from the article, so you don't actually have to click the link to see what it's about.

Northwestern University's esteemed Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications — one of the nation's top graduate programs for aspiring journalists — issued dozens of diplomas with the program's own name misspelled.

I'd also note that the formal name of the school includes "Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications". As I described journalism schools of four decades ago, the main thing they claim to teach is general non-fiction writing and communication. The fact that modern educational institutions often do a piss-poor job of accomplishing what they claim is their goal doesn't change what their goal is.

 

[CTListener]

Here's an excellent example of the caliber of America's current most respected journalism schools.

Below is a "fair use" extract from the article, so you don't actually have to click the link to see what it's about.

Northwestern University's esteemed Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications — one of the nation's top graduate programs for aspiring journalists — issued dozens of diplomas with the program's own name misspelled.

I'd also note that the formal name of the school includes "Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications". As I described journalism schools of four decades ago, the main thing they claim to teach is general non-fiction writing and communication.

I was in j-school 40 years ago (Syracuse) and copy editing was a tiny piece of the curriculum. Spelling and grammar were my strong suits coming out of high school, so I really didn't need much instruction in copy editing in college, but after 33 years as a copy editor (after three as a sportswriter) I am guessing that it hasn't been taught at all over the past couple of decades.

Much of the poor, sloppy writing you see in today's newspapers, incidentally, is caused less by declining quality of copy editors and more by the changing nature of the copy editors' work -- much more time allocated to production tasks (pagination and feeding/updating the website), much less to actual editing.

 

[Avid Listener]

I was in j-school 40 years ago (Syracuse) and copy editing was a tiny piece of the curriculum. Spelling and grammar were my strong suits coming out of high school, so I really didn't need much instruction in copy editing in college, but after 33 years as a copy editor (after three as a sportswriter) I am guessing that it hasn't been taught at all over the past couple of decades.

Much of the poor, sloppy writing you see in today's newspapers, incidentally, is caused less by declining quality of copy editors and more by the changing nature of the copy editors' work -- much more time allocated to production tasks (pagination and feeding/updating the website), much less to actual editing.

I worked in a TV newsroom for a few months while in college. I was a little amazed at the terrible spelling of many news reporters was, though bad typing skills were probably just as big a factor for making errors. But, when the scripts were read on the air, no one in the viewing audience knew that the on-screen talent was reading words that were typed phonetically. (Which incidentally, should be spelled "fonetiklee".) I worked for a long time in an advertising art studio back when we used hot-metal type from a linotype machine. I got to know a few typographers who were masters of the Linotype. The ones who used to work at newspapers claimed that they were the final line of defense for spelling and punctuation. The reporters would phone the stories to the copy desk, who'd write them down and give them to the linotype operators, who then actually typed everything out for final printing.

And you're totally correct about the changes in newspapers. It was the same in advertising art and catalog work. Instead of skilled writers writing and trained artists doing page layouts and paste-up, desktop publishing software created the dual-hat job of writer/artist. The result was output that looked like it was written by an artist, and laid out and designed by a writer.

 

[frankberry]

Before my retirement, I was the Newsroom Computer System (Avid iNEWS) Administrator for a major market TV station.
The Producers and Writers of our newscasts were pretty good spellers but occasionally, something would slip through.
Since the iNEWS Servers fed the stories to the TelePrompTer, the misspelled words would appear on the Prompter screens.
The iNEWS Servers also created the text for the 'Supers' and 'Lower Thirds' which were then fed to the Chyron Graphics system.
More than once, I've seen spelling errors on the Supers.
It's important that Television News Writers be able to spell.

 

[CTListener]

I worked in a TV newsroom for a few months while in college. I was a little amazed at the terrible spelling of many news reporters was, though bad typing skills were probably just as big a factor for making errors. But, when the scripts were read on the air, no one in the viewing audience knew that the on-screen talent was reading words that were typed phonetically. (Which incidentally, should be spelled "fonetiklee".)

And now we are getting AP copy written for both print and broadcast -- a cost-cutting measure, no doubt. The latest atrocity is the names of states being spelled out in the body of stories while still being abbreviated in datelines. So you'll see "FALL RIVER, Mass. (AP) -- Aaron Hernandez, a native of Bristol, Connecticut, told a judge Tuesday ..." Does today's copy editor have time to clean this up? Not usually. I half-expect the sports wire for newspapers to start giving the names of leagues in broadcast style -- N-B-A. Oh, and do you REALLY need to remind radio/TV people that it's not pronounced "un-bah"?

 

[frankberry]

Writing for radio and TV is completely different than writing for the print media.

 

[Small Market Guy]

I do a little segment in the beginning of my show where I just share a couple of stories from the AP "AM Prep Kickers" portion of NewsDesk.

Every day there are multiple typos and misspellings.

From the AP.

Journalism is in bad shape right now.

 

[Avid Listener]

Writing for radio and TV is completely different than writing for the print media.

True. In print media, you can't just throw out pithy little telegrams with no details or explanations.

 

[JeffM]

Writing for radio and TV is completely different than writing for the print media.

Basically, the difference to me is that print copy has to look right when read while radio (or TV) copy has to sound right when spoken. That's just as true of ad copy or continuity as news.