ABSTRACT

News on radio ranges from twenty-four-hour coverage on all-news stations to stations that provide no news at all. When preparing copy for a news shift, one may expect to work with news from several sources. Some stories will be generated by station reporters; others will come from news providers. To help for developing writing skills, Chet Casselman, a highly experienced news director and former national president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, offers guidelines. They are, for the most part, equally applicable to writing news for television. Field reporters are responsible for live coverage of events as they occur; recorded actualities, voicers, and wraps; and occasional research for, and production of, minidocs, brief documentaries presented as a series, usually over several days. When reporting live, it's one's responsibility to create a word picture of a scene, including sights, sounds, smells, tension in the air, and factual details.