Continuing Capstone Research (1st week of Feb.)

Photo by Andy White
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thedoctorpod/5376222581/

This week I have been doing some research out of the book Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production by Jonathan Kern. I have been focusing on sections of the book involving the difference between writing for newspaper and writing for audio broadcast, reporting tips, and story editing. Interesting and useful information I have found includes the following:

•  Newspaper writings are not "written for the ear" (Kern 25), and they often state information faster and in a more elaborate way than anyone anyone could absorb it (Kern 25). Often, when a listener misses a fact or has trouble understanding the message they do not tune in long.

•  Proper audio broadcast writing is more simplistic in sentence structure, and some of the sentences even overlap a little so the listeners can understand more easily (Kern 26-27).

•  "Yes" or "no" questions typically do not yield good actualities (Kern 54). Asking "how" questions avoids the "yes" or "no" problem.

• " Either" and "or" questions should also be avoided because it "boxes in the interviewee" and limits their answers and responses (Kern 54-55).

•  Attempting to get interviewees to use analogies normally leads to entertaining and understandable results (Kern 55).

• When story editing, watch out for echoes [telling people the same thing in different ways twice], unidentified actualities [always add an ID to make the audio bytes less confusing], confusing IDs between two speakers, etc (Kern 108-09).

Kern, Jonathan. Sound Reporting: the NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008. Print.