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…
Category: 06. Writing the Story: Broadcast
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…
Punctuation made fun
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 into the average newscast! Tragic to think that many writers may not know better.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…