Tips for writing TV news stories

Mike Schuh has been covering daily news at the same station in Baltimore for 17 years, winning a Murrow and several Emmy awards along the way. His official title is general assignment reporter at WJZ-TV, but he prefers to describe himself as a storyteller. So when I asked him how young journalists can improve their [...]

How to put together a TV news package?

Sometimes it’s fun to poke fun ourselves and British humorist, and journalist Charlie Brooker is particularly good at it.  In the following segment, he explains how to put together the essential elements of a TV pkg.

The truth can be painful, can’t it? In doing a search for the video, I also stumbled across a couple [...]

Punctuation made fun

Okay, I admit it. I’m a grammar-and-spelling nut. And I think it’s critically important for journalists to get it right. In my view, “little” mistakes on the air, in print or online matter because they can dent our credibility. After all, if we can’t manage subject-verb agreement, what else might we be getting wrong?
College journalism [...]

Overcome adjective addiction

Shocking! Tragic! Unbelievable!
Not the stories that came with those labels attached, but the way they’re written. It’s shocking how many worthless adjectives are being crammed [...]

Critiquing a TV news story

Multimedia journalism is a lot like baseball, the way the Tom Hanks character describes it in the movie A League of Our Own. “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.”
But with practice and coaching, you can improve your baseball skills. The same goes for multimedia journalism.
I’m often asked [...]

Checklist for multimedia accuracy

Smaller staffs, shorter deadlines and more platforms to feed. Is it any wonder mistakes get on the air and online? In today’s short-handed, 24/7 newsrooms, it’s more important than ever for anyone involved in producing content to double check it for accuracy. Don’t think someone else will catch even the most obvious errors. They [...]

What's in a word?

Language is always changing, so it’s no surprise to find a few new words in the latest edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Among this year’s additions are two media terms: vlog and webisode. But the simple fact that a word is in the dictionary doesn’t make it suitable for use in a news story. Some [...]

Journalism advice on YouTube

YouTube’s new Reporter’s Center is already getting lots of attention from journalism bloggers and the 30 or so videos posted there have already garnered more than 100,000 views.
The YouTube Reporters’ Center is a new resource to help you learn more about how to report the news. It features some of the nation’s top journalists and [...]

Writing better news stories

Tom Hallman, Jr. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who conducts narrative writing seminars for the Society of Professional Journalism and writes a column for SPJ’s Quill magazine.  This month he wrote about what separates a great story from a good one, and though they’re geared primarily to print reporters, most of his comments make a lot of [...]

Apostrophe love

Its really a shame the apostrophe doesn’t get it’s fair share of love. See the glaring errors? John Richards would. He’s a retired British journalist and founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, an organization devoted to just one cause: saving the much-abused little punctuation mark.
Richards told the Washington Post’s John Kelley that he sees errors [...]