Anyone watching television news these days could be forgiven for thinking they’ve accidentally tuned into a strange new game show called “Hide the Verb.” No matter how hard you try, it seems, you just can’t find one.

Remember verbs? They’re the action words that come between subjects and objects, telling what happened and when. Try locating one in this NBC Nightly News script: “Less resilient, local business. Dwight’s concession stand, in the family three generations. Sales this summer off 75 percent.” Not a verb in sight.

What is going on in TV newsrooms? It seems unlikely we’re victims of some vast anti-verb conspiracy that has recruited news writers from coast to coast. Instead, this new news-speak could actually be the result of a misguided attempt to improve broadcast writing by making it more active and immediate. The goal is laudable. The results are laughable.

Problem number one: Some writers appear to believe that by eliminating all forms of the verb “to be,” they can avoid the passive voice. Wrong. The best way to spot a passive is to look for the subject of the sentence. If it comes after the verb, or if it’s missing altogether, you’ve used a passive. “The body was found at noon” is passive because we don’t know who found it. Taking out “was” solves nothing at all. Former TV news reporter Ike Pigott has his own tongue-in-cheek explanation for why writers might be killing off auxiliary verbs like “is” or “was.” “Maybe they feel more room for important facts when small words removed.”

Problem number two: When verbs do turn up in copy they’re often disguised as gerunds or participles, trailing an “-ing” behind them. On Fox News, for instance, Shepard Smith’s scripts are notorious for overdoing that “-ing” thing. “Cops and demonstrators clashing openly in the streets of the nation’s capital, pepper spray, smoke bombs, night sticks, beating back the crowds.” That’s not active copy. It’s a run-on sentence fragment. And it violates a central principle of good writing. As George Orwell put it, good prose is like a windowpane. It does not draw attention to itself.

Problem number three: Some scripts have verbs, all right, but the verbs don’t get along. “Golfers getting quite a surprise on the green when a single-engine plane makes an emergency landing. It happened at the Hillcrest Country Club in Hollywood. A plane which was towing a banner experiencing problems and forced to land. The pilot putting it down safely near the 11th hole.” Could the writers at Miami’s WSVN-TV have been engaged in a contest that day to see who could cram the most verb tenses into one paragraph?

All this “ing-ing” and verb dropping and tense shifting in news writing is not accidental. It appears to be part and parcel of an ongoing effort to make news sound more current, more happening, more now. But the result is news that sounds more awkward, more phony, more odd. What could be stranger than the false present tense, a verb virus that seems to be spreading from newsroom to newsroom. “Payne Stewart dies in a plane crash,” we’re told, a full day after the accident, when the truth is that Payne Stewart died. Using the present tense in cases like this isn’t just bad grammar, it’s dishonest and misleading, and it ought to go.

Mark Wright (now a morning anchor at KING-TV in Seattle) suspects that what’s driving all this verb abuse is a desire for a “snappy, headliney” sound. But he says the cost of achieving that sound is too high: “The result is the viewer must really work to understand what the story is about.”

Writing that is hard to follow only serves to widen the existing gap between broadcast journalists and their viewers. It reinforces the public’s perception that people in newsrooms are distant and different from everyone else, since they certainly don’t talk like ordinary folks.

Former TV news director Scott Libin has a suggestion for breaking the verb-free habit: Try talking that way to somebody in person and see what kind of funny looks you get. “Come to think of it,” he says, “that’s probably the way a lot of people look at their televisions while the news is on.” Could that possibly explain why so many people aren’t even watching the news any more?

It used to be axiomatic that broadcast newswriting should be conversational. The verb-less verbiage that’s getting on the air these days is unnatural in the extreme. It often sounds more like news delivered by telegram. “Seven shot, one dead, stop. Police investigating, stop.” Stop, indeed. Please.

This article was originally published by RTNDA Communicator magazine, July 2000. 

One strategy when faced with a non-visual story or a story that would typically be told with predictable images is to think of an analogy that can bring the story to life. What does this situation or process remind you of? Ask your sources for ideas. Can you compare it to something that people are already familiar with?

One of my all-time favorite stories illustrated this way explained the physics behind a NASCAR crash. The driver survived because his car hit a wall with a glancing blow, not head-on. WGHP’s Bob Buckley showed what happens when a tomato hits a wall the same way–splat for a head-on collision, but only a split skin for a glancing blow. Trust me, it was both visual and memorable.

The same basic strategy–comparing something you can’t really see to something you can–helped NPR produce a memorable story when the earth’s population reached seven billion. Instead of relying on the usual images of babies and crowded streets, NPR found a great analogy and produced a video to illustrate it online.

The reason this strategy works is that it employs what I like to call the velcro theory of news. News is just information unless it sticks to something you already have, at which point it becomes knowledge and understanding. Try using an analogy for a non-visual story, if you haven’t already. And please point us to more examples of stories that put this principle to work so we can share them.

Freelance writer J. Maureen Henderson lays out some of that strategic thinking in a post at Forbes, “On Becoming Barbara Walters.”

If done right, interviewing is actually a neat little game – you use all of your investigative and interpersonal talents (asking, listening, analyzing) to engage another person in conversation, mine that interaction for useful information and then use that information to create or augment a compelling story. You need to be perceptive, inquisitive, adaptable and more than a little bit crafty.

For Henderson, the first step is knowing the story you want to tell. Absolutely right. Like a good story, a good interview should have a focus. That doesn’t mean you’ve outlined your script in advance and you’re just looking for a sound bite to plug in. (I’ve seen reporters who worked that way, believe it or not, and while they never missed deadline their stories were always pedestrian at best.)

An interview is a conversation with a purpose and the reporter is (or should be) in the driver’s seat. You need to be open to unexpected detours, but you also need a road map to remember where you’re going. You should know what questions you plan to ask and why you’re asking them. What is the point of talking to this person, anyway? If you don’t know, you’re probably wasting their time and yours.

Henderson also advises interviewers to “leave yourself out of it.”

There’s a fine line between building a rapport and comfort level that gets you the juiciest candid quotes and being obsequious and fawning in your attempt to bond with your subject. Recognize the line and stay on the professional side of it.

I agree, up to a point. Not that I’m in favor of fawning or unprofessional conduct, of course. But you want to come off as a real person, not a robot, especially if you’re interviewing “ordinary” people who need to be put at ease. Under those circumstances, it’s OK to open up a bit to the person you’re interviewing, as long as you remember there’s only one star in an interview and it’s not you.

Using Facebook for a TV investigation: Proof that social media are great reporting tools.

Digital note-taking tools: A review of free and low-cost software to help you keep track of information.

How to learn social media skills at mid-career: A three-point plan for getting up to speed on social media.

Is there any hope for quality in local TV news?: Review of a documentary that paints a gloomy picture.

Why journalists should learn to love data: Tips and tools for working with data that can lead you to great stories.

Do-it-yourself interactive graphics: How to use ManyEyes.

Recommended journalism textbooks: Originally posted in 2008, an updated list leading off with the second edition of Advancing the Story.

Secrets of the TV stations of the year: The shared newsroom culture and personal connections behind the three 2011 winners.

How to interview children: A tip sheet on how to talk to kids on camera.

Resolve to be a more enterprising reporter: What is takes to turn better stories (posted on New Year’s Eve 2010).

What did I learn by looking back at this list? It seems pretty obvious that tips and how-to posts are most popular with NewsLab regulars, so one of my goals for this year is to bring you more of what you’re looking for. If you have specific requests, please let me know.

In the meantime, here’s to a terrific 2012.

Making the best of things takes preparation, says Matthew Nordin of WMBF in Myrtle Beach, S.C. His holiday survival guide includes advice to plan plenty of stories in advance. That may sound obvious, but it’s always amused me the way holidays seem to sneak up on newsrooms. Good grief! It’s Christmas tomorrow. Does anyone have any story ideas?

Another simple suggestion from Nordin: Bring food.

Early in my career, when I had to report on Christmas Day, I made the mistake of thinking I could just roll-up to McDonald’s or Wendy’s like any old day of the year. Nope. Have a good meal prepared for yourself that’s microwavable. Make sure it’s better than your average lunch/dinner at work. Treat yourself since it’s a holiday. It’ll make you feel better.

Some newsrooms I’ve worked in went to the trouble of providing a holiday meal, but invariably I’d be in the field when the food arrived.  A granola bar from the snack machine just doesn’t cut it on a holiday, so Nordin’s advice is right on point.

Just because you’re working doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate, of course. Christmas in January? Been there, done that. And as Nordin points out, it’s really not all that terrible to be at work on a holiday. The managers are gone,” he says. “The people who are in the newsroom are usually in a good mood. And you’ve got a comp day coming!”

So plan ahead and do your best to enjoy it if you have to work over the holidays. I could point out that if you’re working the holidays at least you have a job, but I won’t. Oh wait. I just did.

Some of you may know that my dad recently passed. He was my hero and defined the words gentleman and optimist. When he was stationed over in France for the war, he and his Army buddies loved to read Shakespeare. Growing up in Iowa he quoted Shakespeare all the time. (I thought it was normal that dads did this.) One of his quotes stuck with me over the years and I wanted to share it here…

“Nothing is but thinking makes it so.” Read those words again. Nothing is but thinking makes it so. In essence, our actions are defined by our thoughts. We manifest what is on our minds. The popular book “The Secret” is all about manifesting our thoughts into reality. I recommend reading it.

Think of it as self-talk. Professional athletes do it all the time. So can we. My own self-talk when I am out telling stories is very simple. “Wide, medium, tight, super tight, get the moment.” I say it over to myself a hundred times while covering a story. I am hyper-focused on it. We manifest our thoughts. We really do. Dave (Wertheimer) and I brought this simple storytelling philosophy to KSTP when we were there.

Great storytelling doesn’t require some deep hidden secret or some magical formula, it’s as simple and fundamental as this statement: “Wide, medium, tight, super tight, get the moment.” What is your self-talk while out on assignment? What’s running through your mind? Lunch? Well, that’s not a bad thought as lunch is important. Maybe you are grousing about the story. (We’ve all been there.) Remember: It’s an honor to tell stories. Your story and the people you are covering need your best commitment.

We know that the building blocks to a great story are wide shots, medium shots, tight shots and super tight shots. It does not get much more elementary than that. Edited together they make for a wonderful sequence — just as the eye sees life. Life is a series of wide shots, medium shots, tight shots and super tight shots. They are like pieces to the puzzle. Life is NOT a series of medium shots cut together. Your self-talk heavily influences your outcome. If you are out complaining about your boss or whatever negative thought you may have while on assignment, your story is going to suffer. That is baseline reality.

When we are focused on this kind of self-talk (WMTST) all of a sudden we are aware of all kinds of gorgeous wides and tights. Why, (I’ll say it again) because we manifest our thoughts. Plus, when we record a variety of wide shots, medium shots, tight shots and super tight shots, your editor will LOVE you for having your bases covered. In the end, we all edit faster and hit our deadlines quicker when we have all the pieces to the puzzle. If you don’t believe me, try to edit a story with all wide shots.

On top of shooting wides, mediums, tights and super tights, remember the moments. Moments, moments, moments! If Elvis is running naked along a corn field, what are you going to do? Set up a tripod, wait for the clouds to pass or the color temperature to warm up (well that would be nice) but moments are fleeting, just get the dang shot. Shoot and move. Be nimble on your feet. Anticipate. Don’t be afraid to go handheld if you need the moment. If it does not exist on tape or a digital file, it does not exist for your viewers.

Moments are simply emotional scenes. It may be laughter, sadness, happiness or suspense. It could be a simple smile. The emotion is what people remember. Rarely do people remember what we said or what we did, what they remember is the emotion, how we made them feel … the moments!

WMTST makes your story air-able. Moments make your story memorable.

“The Sewing Machine” is a video produced by former NBC reporter John Larson and one-time NPPA photojournalist of the year Lisa Berglund. It’s a video with a clear purpose–to raise money for VisionFund, the microfinance arm of World Vision International. But it’s also a story that illustrates many fundamental principles of good storytelling.

First, a strong central character. As with many PR shoots, an advance team had done the legwork at a remote location in Rwanda. But Larson and Berglund, being newsies, didn’t think much of the original plan, as Larson explained in the Facebook Storytellers group:

We rejected story lines that had been set up for a month, and found the sewing machine woman because we were searching for a more photo-rich, metaphorical story line. We found and selected the stronger details and story lines within her story.

Second, the story has a clear beginning, middle and end. In this case, there’s a story within the story, which has its own beginning, middle and end. But the viewer never feels lost or confused. See what you think when you watch the video.

Because this wasn’t a news story, Berglund and Larson did a ton of set-up. To use a news term, they staged the shoot, moving locations to get a more photogenic background, deciding what people should wear, and matching shots they knew they would re-create when they got back to the United States.

And because this wasn’t a news story, Berglund had the courage to shoot it with a camera she had never used before–the Canon 5D–a digital SLR.  ”It is not good in reactive situations (like news),” Larson says. “The lenses are slow, bulky, time consuming… and gorgeous.” Virtually everything was shot with natural light.

Audio was a different matter, Berglund says.

Monitoring audio is one of the biggest challenges. Most of the audio was shot with my Sennheiser MKH-60, plugged into a Zoom H4N audio recorder. The interviews were shot with a Lectrosonic 400 series wireless, also plugged into the Zoom.

Because so much additional equipment was required, Berglund wound up recruiting an assistant on the spot who carried the recorder, wore headphones and got the mics in close.

Sound is my passion. It was really hard to give up complete control. But the risk was worth it in the end, and allowed me to concentrate on the visuals.

One of the most memorable moments in the video is the shot that reveals how the woman expanded her business. It’s a lock-down shot that was carefully planned, with each individual element shot separately and then combined in the edit room. “The trick is using the effect when the narrative is building, or adding, or growing,” says Larson. “Then the effect supports the story you’re trying to tell.” So it does.

In addition to everything else he does, Krulwich now co-anchors public radio’s Radiolab, which this year won a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for broadcast excellence. As the program explores science and technology, it’s also “rethinking and reinventing American radio,” says Ira Glass of “This American Life” in an appreciation of Radiolab posted at Transom.

Glass deconstructs how Krulwich and his co-host, Jad Abumrad, achieve their chatty on-air style that almost makes listeners feel they’re eavesdropping on an actual conversation instead of listening to a radio story.

They’ll come into the studio together with a script that’s halfway between a real script and a list of story beats they know they need to hit…They’ll ad lib their way through this so-called “script” a few times, rolling tape the whole time. Then Jad or one of the show’s producers cuts together a version. They listen to it. Then they’ll go back and re-record bits of banter, to make a quicker transition from one section to the next, or to slow down and explain some point more thoroughly, or to set up a piece of tape slightly differently. They’ll do this three or four times, jumping into the studio to make little improvements and adjusting as Jad and the other producers layer in the other production elements, the music and sound.

The result of all that effort is an effortless sound, with lots of back-and-forth between the co-anchors, as in the first story in this episode:

Glass notes that other public radio programs, like Planet Money, sometimes use a similar approach of having one reporter or anchor comment on another’s story. “Having two narrators lets them express amazement, underline what’s funny, manipulate the pacing, pause on a difficult idea and bring up opposing arguments in a very graceful way,” Glass writes.

Some commenters on Glass’s post say the presentation style he so admires feels contrived and forced. But I think he’s onto something:

TV news continually loses ratings. And one way we broadcast journalists can fight back and hold our audience is to sound like human beings on the air. Not know-it-all stiffs. One way the opinion guys kick our ass and appeal to an audience is that they talk like normal people, not like news robots speaking their stentorian news-speak. So I wish more broadcast journalism had such human narrators at its center. I think that would help fact-based journalism survive.

If you think public radio is a different beast and what they do there shouldn’t be tried in commercial newscasts, I beg to differ. Sure, Radiolab’s highly-produced techniques obviously would be difficult or maybe impossible to pull off live. But why shouldn’t TV anchors and reporters try a little harder to speak the way ordinary people talk?

“If you don’t really love doing it, you’re not going to do well,” she said in an NPPA interview. “It’s such a monster that you battle every day. You have to be so many things in a day.”

Here’s one of Michael’s prize-winning stories, a story that she says changed her life because “it showed me a lot about what people are willing to give up and do for other people.” It’s also an example of the value of listening. Michael says she met the man in the story when he demanded to see her ID as she entered a government building. She had to put down all her gear to find it. She wasn’t all that happy to see him again on her way out, but when he asked if she wanted to hear his story, she stopped long enough to hear what he had to say.

Michael does plenty of stories like that without a stand-up, but when she does decide to include one she spends a great deal of time setting up and shooting it. The result is often a multi-part stand-up, like the one in this story.

Did you count the number of shots in that stand-up? How long do you think it took Michael to get that done, working alone? Here’s the answer, in a behind-the-scenes look at how she produced that stand-up:

Thanks, Michelle Michael, for sharing your work and showing what it takes to do it well.

Stand-ups can be an effective way of explaining complicated issues or concepts, especially if you can find a simple analogy to illustrate the point. How does a retention pond work? Kind of like a coffee filter. Show-and-tell stand-ups can compensate for a lack of video. Where did the children first see the bear? Right here, next to this tree. These kinds of stand-ups aren’t for every story, every day, but used judiciously, they can help viewers make sense of difficult subjects.

They key word is “judiciously.” Joanne Stevens of Stevens Media Consulting says it’s important to remember that a stand-up is not all about you. “More and more I feel I’m being distracted by reporter stand-ups rather than being further edified about the story,” she writes on the RTDNA website.

You are not in a contest to bring back the most clever or viral standup.  Ideally you can show us something interesting in your standup, or you may ‘just stand there’ and explain where you are and why it’s significant. You are on camera to communicate with us personally, not to assume the Shakespearean role of  ‘I’m on TV and you’re not.’

Another way of adding visual interest to a longer stand-up is to shoot it in multiple takes. This allows you to walk your viewer through a complex process by illustrating individual steps in a visual sequence. Create a simple storyboard in advance to ensure that you’ll have everything you need for editing purposes.

Can you do this as a solo journalist? Absolutely. KUSA’s Kevin Torres does it all the time. The short stand-up in this package is made up of three shots, all framed differently:

“Try to add some natural sound in your stand-ups,” Torres suggests. “This helps break up the piece a lot and helps with the flow.”

Too many stand-ups are an afterthought, thrown together at the end of a shoot just to get something in the can. A stand-up should be an essential part of your narrative, adding new information and moving the story forward. A little forethought and some critical questions can make all the difference:

• Why would I want to include a stand-up in this story?
• What information would I convey in a stand-up?
• Do I have something to show or demonstrate in this stand-up?
• Where and when might I do this stand-up?
• How will the stand-up fit into the finished story?

Before you shoot any stand-up you need a clear idea of your story structure—not a complete script but a mental outline. Sometimes, it’s helpful to shoot more than one version in case that structure changes. But if you wind up with a stand-up that really doesn’t fit, resist the temptation to use it anyway. Then promise yourself that tomorrow, you’ll plan and execute a stand-up that really works.