ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the art of structuring and writing the recorded report — the package. The well-honed package is still the best way of telling a story concisely and directly. The skills of packaging news have enjoyed a renaissance because more and more packaged news is available on a variety of media. Multimedia packages, using software such as Macromedia's Flash, extend the boundaries of the traditional package. The non-linear online package is the closest thing to a new form of journalism since the advent of broadcasting. Traditional broadcast journalism is a linear form. The most successful online packages have a high level of interactivity. The package 'learns' things about the user, and offers, for example, the option of restarting a piece of video from the point at which the viewer left off. The traditional TV or radio package is probably as good a way of telling a linear story as has ever been devised.
