Preface

Back when I was a student like you, I often wondered how a professor analyzing Shakespearean plays could tell me why Shakespeare wrote as he did. How could the teacher be so sure about what Shakespeare meant if Shakespeare didn’t tell him? I wanted to know what ran through Shakespeare’s mind, not just the professor’s. Impossible though it was, I wanted to hear from the writer himself.

That’s why I decided to write this textbook about writing for broadcast news. No, the writing in my news stories wasn’t like Shakespeare’s (which might be a blessing for audiences that just want straightforward explanations of stories); it’s neither as incisive nor as complex. But at least I can use it in examples throughout the book, and explain why I wrote something the way I did—sometimes effectively, sometimes not. Therefore, though unconventional for a textbook, much of it is written in the first person.

Sure, there are already lots of good textbooks about broadcast news out there, but from the first day I taught a journalism course at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, then later at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado, I couldn’t escape one unavoidable flaw common to almost all the textbooks I considered using: they were about someone else’s work. By and large, their authors could only analyze someone else’s news stories—whether well or poorly pro-duced—secondhand. Just like my longing back when I studied Shakespeare, I wanted to take their analyses a step further, and ask the journalists themselves why they wrote and produced broadcast news stories the way they did.

You’re going to get those answers here. Most of the writing examples throughout this book are from my own career, mostly as a correspondent for ABC News. Some won awards (including two Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award and Bronze Medallion from the Society of Professional Journalists), some are embarrassingly bad, and in one way or another demonstrate pitfalls I hope you’ll learn to avoid. But all serve a couple of purposes: first and most important, to demonstrate not just the difference between good and bad writing and good and bad production, but also to give you insight into the reasons why something was good and something else wasn’t.

The other purpose? To show you how exciting the news business can be. This book isn’t a personal memoir, but it has some of the elements of one, because instead of just giving you examples of stories and how my colleagues and I covered them, I want to give you some background too: the fun, fulfilling, silly, stupid, challenging, crazy, adventurous, dangerous things you sometimes have to do to get your story. I can’t think of another career in which I’d have gotten to pet an African lion, and fire a machine gun, and ride around the track before the Indy 500, and follow the Tour de France in a helicopter, and climb around the face of Mt. Rushmore and out on the girders of the Eiffel Tower, and break bread with the Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia, and observe the worst oil spill in history, and see the inside of an Afghan jail, and meet presidents and dictators alike.

For many who cover the news—whether writing, editing, producing, recording, or transmitting—it’s not a nine-to-five job; on the contrary, the hours can be long and irregular. And despite the fortunes paid to some of the big personalities in broadcasting, the pay for most broadcast journalists is modest. Other rewards make it worth your while. Whether covering city hall or the nation’s capital, fatal head-on collisions or fatal earthquakes, you are on the periphery of history. You get to deal firsthand with issues and events that everyone else learns secondhand when they hear the news in their cars or watch it on TV or read it in the newspaper.

Of course, you’re the one who gives it to them. But you’ll only keep that privilege if you do it honestly and effectively. That’s why it’s important that you pay attention to what you learn in this book. It’s mainly about writing, but in broadcast news, it takes more than good writing to produce a good story. It takes good researching, good reporting, good interviewing, good organizing, good pictures, and good sound—all of which are worthless without good ethics.

This book is about both television and radio news. For the most part, although the bulk of examples throughout the book apply to television coverage, a lesson for one medium (TV) can apply to the other (radio). Sure, a few things, particularly technical points about production and format, are specific to only one medium or the other. But I deliberately did not divide the whole book into separate sections about each, because the principles of good journalism apply to both.

One of the most innovative figures in the history of broadcast journalism was a man who started his career in broadcast sports before moving into news: Roone Arledge, the President of ABC News during most of my twenty-three years there. When he first took over our news division, most of us who already called ourselves veterans were skeptical. We expected every news broadcast would be packaged like the Super Bowl. But we were pleasantly surprised, never more than when he articulated a mission statement for news coverage that ended up being quoted by a competitor from CBS News at Arledge’s funeral: “If a story breaks, you send the best people you can find out to see what’s happening, then tell the rest of us whether we need to worry about it.” Be the best, and you’ll have the privilege of telling the rest.