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- Thread starter Element9
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Hey, that works for the radio networks!
Exactly right. NPR delivers content on music, film, theatre and other iconic cultural events. They go in depth on their coverage and provoke thought...
That is not, exactly, what I am saying.
When I first studied journalism at Michigan State, I was instructed in the inverted pyramid process of story construction.
Lead with the who, what, where, when. Follow with paragraphs detailing those aspects. Then add depth to the details.
The idea was that the print reader could tell from the first paragraph whether they wanted to read further. But even if they did not, the key details had been read.
I find that some of the NPR stories tend to put the depth too close to the start of a story, and miss clarification on the 4-w's. And since radio does not afford the option of skipping to the next story, I frequently get a bit more detail than I wanted, and within my listening span the drek exceeds the story count.
There may be intelligent writing, certainly. But not brilliant. At least not most of the time.
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Keep in mind that NPR has its own stylebook. They don't necessarily have to follow a traditional stylebook. They MAY use the traditional stylebook in Segment 1 of their shows. They call it their "news top." They will typically use the traditional stylebook in their top of the hour newscasts. Those are traditional TOH newscasts as you'd hear from CBS or ABC. But their feature stories use their own stylebook, and that stylebook has more to do with production style than journalism style. So their features begin with sound, not a hard lead. Their features begin with a setting of the scene. It may take a while before they get to the lead of the story. But they don't want to bang you over the head. So it's a completely different approach to the presentation of a story. It goes great with wine and cheese.
Maybe they need peppier news sounders for some people...
Are you referring to print stories on the NPR website or the broadcast content? Listeners don't "read" the Radio.
NPR doesn't need to "dumb down" their presentation. The internet is full of empty Click Bait headlines for the average slob with no attention span. You may not agree, but some listeners are capable of actual "listening & hearing" an in depth story...
The intent is to fit in with their affiliates, some of which are classical music stations.
I am referring to the broadcast stories.
The difference between print and radio is that radio does not enable the listener to skip to the next story. So writing has traditionally followed the concise story structure that does not elongate each item beyond what the intended listener desires to hear.
As I said, for me the deviance from this structure and the oddly constructed features (which sound like essays and not news stories) is not appealing. The resultant long-form nature of the news programs generally means that in my listening window I don't hear much of the late news.
Many of us do not have the time and opportunity to listen the length of time that it takes to get full coverage on the NPR services. I find the BBC news segments more concise, and the world news coverage is significantly better.
Obviously, there is an audience for the NPR offerings. But on a national basis, it is a very small percentage.
It depends what "small" is in terms of national programming. They claim 37 million listeners.
When compared against other national shows, both All Things Considered and Morning Edition are in the Top 5, with Rush, Hannity, and Ramsey.
By the same token, the pacing of those other shows isn't any faster.
And all reach relatively small segments of the total radio audience.
It's also a bit of an "apples to oranges" comparison to look at single shows like Rush next to an entire lineup like NPR.
My personal preferences don't as much involve pacing as story selection, writing and story count in comparable time periods. In fact, my preferred news source, the BBC, is no faster paced than NPR or any of the others (I'm not comparing the style of Byron MacGregor or J. Paul Huddleston with that of NPR anchors, of course).
Actually I gave you both, with the 37 million being for the entire lineup, and 14.7 million for ATC and 14.5 million for ME compared to 15 million for Rush.
That was a format which evolved in the days when stories were sent out to newspapers via the telegraph.
One never knew when the telegraph wires might go down or some other technical failure might occur, so they
learned to frontload their stories with who, what and where to try and get at least that much out there.
In 2019 it may be a structure that has outlived its usefulness.
"House Intelligence Committee" is an oxymoron, but I digress.
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