Note taking for me has always been defined by deadline — the tighter it is, the more my notes tend to reflect immediate needs: the in/out cues of the best potential quotes, the most important facts/statistics that I’ll need RIGHT NOW.  I needed to make sure I’d have the quotes I’d need without even looking at the media.  (I used to sync the camera with my watch during extremely tight deadline press conference, so time code would be time of day. There are now software packages that will do the same thing.)

If I have a little room to breathe, my notes reflect how I think the story might best be told: you’ll see rough outlines suggesting the beginning, middle and end of the story, and the best, rough sentences that occur to me during the gathering process. And ideas for a standup bridge – if necessary.

I often organize my story by using a list of boxes, representing the best video moments/settings/bites — matched with whatever information I may want to share within each “box.”  For example, a story about airport landing fees/taxes might have a box for an amazing shot of 747 landing over our heads, coupled with a statistic: 32 foreign flights land in American airports every second of every working day.  Then there will be another box representing a interview with a Federal Tax Policy Specialist, etc.  I started organizing stories this way from the very beginning, and I realize now it reflected my interest in writing from and for whatever video I had, instead of the other way around.

As a television journalist I often have a video backup of many interviews, so that relieves the pressure of note taking if my deadline is not tight.  In local news, I always had a tape recorder that I would use for every interview.  As a national magazine correspondent, I almost never needed a tape recorder — the deadlines were far enough away that we would have complete written transcripts in our hands before I began viewing raw tape or writing.

Here are two shots of my notebooks from recent stories.  On the right you’ll notice all I’m really writing down are proper spellings, ages and specific numbers about the number of hours the people work at their jobs:  ”16 – 23″, how premature their baby was: “18 months” and how much in debt they are in medical bills: ”30K”  On the left you’ll see how sparse my notes can be, I only wrote down a favorite quote that I knew was off camera that I didn’t want to forget.  (The director of a Wild Mustang Rescue operation said, “I have the best job in the worst location in America.”  Beneath that, all I am writing down are specific events that I want to research or look up later: in Ohio, Pomona, CA, and northern Nevada.

Lastly, I try not to bury myself in my notebook when listening to people. I think it much more important to connect with them.  I’ll often rewrite or organize my notes immediately after and interview, or at lunch, or at night in the hotel room.  Unless it is numbers, titles, spellings that I might forget.  Also, sometimes my scribbles are so random, they’ll make sense to me for about a week — but will be incomprehensible if I look at them a year later. Not good, but they seem to get the job done.

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. 

“Leave the notebook at home.” That’s what one journalism site recommended when reviewing Evernote, a digital service that stores notes, pictures and Web clips online so users can access them anywhere from any device. It’s a cool tool but it hasn’t replaced my reporter’s notebook and I don’t think it ever will.

A pad and pen are still the most convenient way I’ve found to take notes on assignment. They’re super portable, reliable in all kinds of conditions and never need recharging.

I’ve worked in broadcast news almost my entire career, so I’ve always recorded interviews for radio or television. But as photojournalist Rich Murphy says, “A camera is not a notebook” and shouldn’t be used like one. People who rely on digital recorders instead of taking notes have to go back and listen to everything again to find the sound bites or quotes they’ll use in a story. That’s a huge time suck, and in every newsroom I’ve worked in there’s simply no time to waste.

So how do you take good notes? Like most people, I learned to take notes in school but soon discovered that what worked for me in class didn’t fit my needs as a reporter. As a student, I wrote down pretty much everything the professor said and reviewed my notes later to figure out what was important. As a journalist, I learned to listen for what was most important in an interview and just write that part down. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that I learned to distinguish what was NOT important and left that part out.

These notes are from an interview I did in 2009. Can I still read them? Absolutely. The part I’ve starred reads: ”What we found is people recuperate and keep going. When you’re doing something, making a difference, you don’t get burned out.”

I never learned shorthand but I developed my own abbreviations to save time, picking up ideas from colleagues along the way. I use a dash for “not” or a negative, for example, and an underline to signify “ing” at the end of a word. I leave out a lot of letters. Lower case “e” is “we” and “pl” is “people.” Many years before texting became a verb, I was using the same abbreviations in my notes that many people now use on their smartphones: “u” for “you” and “yr” for “your.” One other speed trick I learned from CBS’s Byron Pitts: I now put a rubber band around the cover and all the used pages so that when I can quickly open the notebook to a clean page. No more flipping!

My goal in taking notes for a today story is to produce something that is clear enough to read live on the air and concise enough to let me review the high points of a 20-minute interview in a minute or two. If I’m turning a story on a short deadline, I mark the time-code from the camera or recorder in my notebook as I’m writing things down, so I can find the exact bite I’m looking for quickly and transcribe it verbatim. A transcript is essential, and not just because it’s going to be posted online. It’s critically important to know precisely what someone said so you can write in and out of the bite.

Notebooks aren’t just for interviews, of course. I write down lots of stuff besides quotes: things said off camera or off the record (which I mark OTR); things I notice or lines I might use (which I put in brackets); questions or ideas to follow up on later (which get a ?).

That’s my system, such as it is. What’s yours?

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 a reporter puts too many twists, turns, or facts into a story, he risks obscuring its message,” Freedman writes in his book, It Takes More Than Good Looks to Succeed at Television News Reporting, now out in a new second edition and available online from the publisher.

In this excerpt, posted with permission, Freedman shares a case study that illustrates a key point: To improve your storytelling, write for your audience, not your bosses.

Not long ago, a reporter sent me samples of his work from a small market. He was twenty-three, still finding his way in his first job, and struggling. “I feel overwhelmed,” he wrote. Translated, that means he had a problem focusing.

The reporter’s clips included a late-news segment about a water main that cracked during a blizzard. Barring complications, a public works crew would replace the damage before the next morning’s rush hour. They did have one concern—that the leaking water might freeze into a sheet of ice and block a major intersection.

In a small city on a slow night, that water main break made big news. The broadcast producer asked our young reporter for a live shot with a package insert. After watching the segment, it was clear that he tried hard with his assignment. If possible, he tried too hard.

The reporter began with a montage of running water accompanied by a symphony of jackhammers. In painstaking detail, he explained how workmen poked holes in the cement and used a special listening device to locate leaks. He filled the piece with so many facts, figures, and obscurities that after a while, it began to look less like a news story, and more like an instructional video about street repair. If a viewer had watched closely, he might have been able to pass a civil service test.

All of the reporter’s problems trace back to one fundamental error. He never put himself in the place of the people at home. He forgot that most of them didn’t care about the specifics of urban street repair. They simply wanted to know when Public Works would fix the break, and if they would need to find alternate routes for the morning commute. The reporter could have given them that basic information in the first fifteen seconds of his live shot.

Then, if he had thought past the assignment sheet, he might have told a narrative story to which anyone might relate—that on a frigid night this crew faced a mean, nasty job. Between their numb fingers, the freezing mud, and the struggle to keep flowing water from turning into sheets of ice, he had dramatic ingredients for a piece with universal appeal.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” the kid asked later. Simple. We chalked it up to nerves and inexperience. He should have taken a figurative step back and trusted his natural curiosity. At that stage of his career, however, this young reporter didn’t have the confidence. He worried so much about missing an element that he overcompensated. Rather than errors of omission, he committed errors of congestion, and crammed too many facts into a ninety-second package.

Put simply, he allowed his fear to confine him.

This is a common mistake. Learn to recognize it, and you will be well on your way to fixing it. When you find yourself in a similar circumstance, whether reporting on politics, economics, science, the law, a union dispute, or some local problem like a broken water line, identify a single theme, storyline, or character, and stay true to it. Get to the point. Write for your viewers, not your bosses. Just because the alphabet begins with “A” and finishes with “Z,” do not feel obligated to detail all twenty-four letters in between.

The next time an assignment overwhelms your focus, that simple rule will help.

Many thanks to Wayne for sharing this excerpt. We have other writing tips from Wayne and a video here.

Powell usually works alone, shooting, writing and editing video packages that stream online. This year, he won a national Edward R. Murrow Award  for writing, for a selection of stories he did largely as a solo journalist.

Here he shares some tips on writing for video, especially when you’re working alone.

Know your story’s personality. Every tale has one. The first part is usually easy: Hard news? Enterprise or investigation? Feature? Figuring it out before you gather elements or very early on in the field gives you focus. It guides what should be shot and how those images will be married with words. A tracked package has different needs than a first person-style story. If I have a hard news story, I know whatever I write will likely carry the piece. So my video needs to back up what I am saying.

I think the second and last lines are key, especially for an online audience who can click away: The second line is my ‘nut graf,’ revealing what the story is about in a simple, declarative sentence. The last line is a variation of my nut graf, reasserting what the story was about and offering a detail that spins it forward. It tells the viewer my story is ending.

Here is a hard-news story that is not all hard edges:

For a feature, I am looking for strong images and good characters I can build into a series of vignettes or scenes. My writing style is more loose but the words here are short bridges between scenes. They move the story forward by offering little reveals about what is coming next, be it a telling piece of video or a person we will meet. Don’t be afraid: If you get bogged down in the material, step back. Say it simply and let the video speak for itself.

Now, a story with personality:

Listen, listen, listen. When I shoot my own material, I’m rolling on anything making noise. When you go to write, natural sound becomes your open, a transition, an exclamation mark, or an ending. When interviewing people, I keep a running log in my head. It’s often the only logging I do. Sometimes after a good line or segment, I reposition the camera, reframing my subject. This adds visual variety – and it creates a marker on my tape.

Keep it simple. We’re talking stand ups here. For me, they are an important part of the writing process because if done poorly, they kill your flow. I prefer stand-up bridges and I like them short. I decide early on if a story will have one. If so, I start thinking about what I will say, how I will shoot myself and what the lines before and after might be. A good stand up for me is seamless, puts the viewer into the story and comes with information.

Technology helps. When I’m in the field, lines will start coming to me. If I can, I e-mail them to myself. Behind the wheel, the recorder in my phone is handy. Or I use a notes app (Simplenote) I’ve loaded on my iPhone and iPad that also syncs with my laptop and desktop, letting me pull up my script on any device.

There is no secret formula, Powell says. Writing is always hard work. But developing strategies that save time at the front end, as Powell has done, can save a lot of headaches at the end of the day and improve the final product, too.  Any tips you’d like to share? Let us know.

“Beyond just the story ‘subject,’ a focus tells you what person, object or theme you’ll be dealing with during your story,” Lamb told my colleague Deb Wenger. “You can start thinking about your story focus while you’re still on your shoot, or even before it starts. When you write your story, if a line of reporter track or a sound bite doesn’t fit your focus, you should probably throw it out.”

While he’s in the field, Wenger writes, Lamb tries to “take off his reporter hat” to take in the scene around him for a few moments.

“What would a normal observer – without the wireless mic, tripod and camera – say or think about what they’re seeing or hearing? Sometimes you can get some great lines for your story, just by taking it all in,” Lamb says.

“When I write, I try to set up the moments I’ve identified with a line of reporter track, providing some context or an observation about what the viewer is about to see, then I let the moment play out, without talking over it.”

Here’s an example–the story that won Lamb the 2011 Sigma Delta Chi award for feature reporting:

“Good writing is as much about what you choose to write as it is about what you don’t write,” Lamb told Wenger. “There are no words I could say that would be more powerful then letting viewers experience a mother kissing her dying four-year-old boy. I think it’s important to not say anything in those cases – and let the natural moment play out for the best impact.”

When he does want his words and video to work together, Lamb says he’s careful to avoid saying exactly what the viewer is seeing in the video. In a story about a memorial service for two police officers, Lamb used a shot of a sign on a storefront that read, CLOSED IN HONOR OF TONY AND MATT. “Instead of saying in my track, ‘Several stores closed so they could attend the memorial for the fallen officers,’ I wrote, ‘Honor is something that causes people to put their normal lives on hold for just a moment.’”

For many writers, crafting a strong ending is a significant challenge, as we’ve noted before. Too many take the easy way out and end on a sound bite. Lamb says he tries to come up with a powerful closing line that gives people a sense that the story is over.

“Reporter Boyd Huppert has a good trick for coming up with closing lines, and it’s worked well for me: Your closing line should make people say to themselves, ‘Ain’t that the truth!’”

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

Last year’s national winner in the small market TV category was Jason Lamb of KTUU in Anchorage, AK. In this post, Lamb shares how he crafts his award-winning stories by spending more time than most with his video.

“It’s important to remember that the goal of any memorable story should be to get information across in a way that makes it easy for people to relate and connect to,” says Lamb. “Logging your tapes (or your cards or your disks) well is a crucial step in that process.”

For Lamb, “logging” is much more than registering the clip number or time code.

He has three key components to his approach:

1. Log as much of the video as time allows
Many less experienced reporters say they’re just too time-crunched to spend time logging, but even a few minutes can improve a story. “There is so much more of the raw footage to log than just the framed up ‘interview shots.’ I log as much as I can: interesting shots that I might want to write to, spontaneous moments with the person I’m interviewing, etc.,” Lamb says.

2. Log “the moments”
According to Lamb, a “moment” is something captured on camera that helps make people forget they are watching a “news report” and makes them feel closer to the story. “They help people relate to what your story is about. It could be the moment that a stem-cell recipient meets his donor for the first time, or a spontaneous reaction to a section of land being eaten away by a raging river. Moments help drive your story,” says Lamb.

3. Log “the layers”
Lamb says good stories have multiple levels or layers to them that keep the audience engaged throughout. “A different layer could be an interesting detail or added ‘twist’ you can introduce in your story at just the right moment to keep people interested,” Lamb says.

Check out one of Lamb’s stories below and check back later for Lamb’s tips on putting words and pictures together in the most compelling way.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

Mark Berkey-Gerard, who teaches journalism at Rowan University in New Jersey, has been exploring ways of helping students think through the process of structuring multimedia stories. On his blog, Campfire Journalism, he shares a few strategies from other educators and journalists that may be useful, including this advice from Mindy McAdams on endings:

A solid, satisfying ending has two parts. They can be called the climax and the resolution, and even though that sounds a bit overblown for a two-minute story. I think you’ll tell a better story if you think of the ending in those terms. The climax is the destination, the place you’re taking the audience, in a straight line from the opening. It will come near the end of the story, but afterward, you also need to provide closure. Make it feel complete. That’s the resolution.

In my view, a strong ending doesn’t just repeat the main point of the story. Unfortunately, weak, redundant endings have become commonplace because they’re easy to write. Just plug the appropriate words into the formula and you’re done: A _____ (determined/committed/jobless, etc) ______ (mother/father/teacher, etc), trying hard to ______ (make it alone/make a difference/find work, etc).

A strong ending needs to button things up. But how? Try one of these approaches:

• Significance –Write a line that says why this story matters. Put the story in context.
• Circular—Write a line that refers back to the lead. It’s often effective to use some of the same words.
• Future—Write a line that says what happens or may happen next.

Let us know if these ideas help and if you have other suggestions to add.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

What’s different this time around? The new edition includes substantial revisions but retains the essentials: how to report, write and produce for multiple platforms. We have chapters on delivery, ethics and job seeking as well. There’s a ton of real-world examples and advice from professional journalists. New screen shots, images and examples are included throughout.

There’s also a new focus on the use of social media and mobile devices in gathering and disseminating news. Difficult to believe, but Twitter didn’t exist when we wrote the first edition. My how times have changed:

A majority of journalists today use social media to do their jobs—mainly to find stories, sources and information quickly and to monitor trends. Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools, once used primarily in breaking news situations, have become a central part of the daily newsgathering process. TV anchor Amy Wood says she gets “lots of tips on breaking news” via her social media sites. One of her Twitter followers told her a hostage crisis at a local bank had been resolved before the police announced it.

We’re hard at work on a new companion website that will be available for use with the book this fall. You’ll be able to buy access to the entire site or to individual modules. Each online module–linked to a chapter in the text–includes interactive exercises, tutorials, resources and examples of multimedia storytelling. The “Ongoing Story” module allows users to report a story from beginning to end, and write a TV package as well as a Web version.

No matter what edition of the text you have, updated chapter-by-chapter content will continue to be available on the Advancing the Story blog.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story