ABSTRACT
That could all be a summary of what you do. But now we need to learn some techniques. Television news has big muscles and a short attention span but for scripting skills we do need a fewmore details in order to do something that sounds quite simple, but actually requires a lot of thought and planning, especially in the digital newsroom where you will be faced with a stream of live underlay scripts, headlines, teases and trails. One of the other main differences between sound and picture scripting and radio
or website writing is elementary – it’s the maths. The print journalist works in space: indents, points and column centimetres. The television writer works in time – minutes and seconds, with a formula that three words of English (or any European language) takes on average just one second to read aloud on the air. Despite word counts and duration calculations in a news production system, this simple three words-per-second guide provides the basis of all writing to pictures in television. This takes into account not only the slight variations in pace between presenters or reporters, but also the different lengths of words used in normal, spoken language.
