Introduction:
In the previous lesson, you reviewed audience appeal, story ideas and ethics. Each of you was given an idea for a news story and begun focusing and researching that idea. You are now ready to continue researching. This research must include a taped interview and will require you to begin writing and recording your news script.
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Task One - Line it Up
You have spent some time determining the focus of your story by deciding the central questions for the story and generating a list of potential sources.
You will be given more time to research and once you have completed your research, follow these steps:
1. Organize your research and eliminate anything that does not work towards answering your central question/s.
2. Determine what your most important facts are and decide what you would like to lead with and end with in your news segment.
3. Decide who you might like to interview regarding this topic.
4. Contact your interviewees and set up a time for an interview. Be sure to ask your subject permission to tape the interview.
5. Create questions for each interview.
6. Have a partner check over your interview questions and make comments or suggestions.
7. Conduct your interview/s.
8. Re-organize your information and begin laying out ideas for your script.
Before you conduct your interview, you may want to review the Art of Interviewing to ensure that you are ready to conduct a successful, professional interview.
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Little Leary about Using the Video Camera?
Watch this video entitled "Dos and Don'ts of a Video Camera" created by students to help students! |
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Task Two - Taping it Up
Once you have finished your research and conducted the interview, you are ready to write the script for your news segment.
Before you begin writing your script, take some time to look at an actual news script. In partners, look at this CTV news script and try to determine the following:
1. What is the writing in black for?
2. What is the writing in red for?
3. What is the writing in blue for?
Once you have taken some time to determine the parts of the news script, look at this key to the script to see if you were right about the purpose of each print colour. |
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Objectives:
You will be able to
- recognize how computers and desktop publishing are used in commercial journalism
- understand and demonstrate copy editing for the electronic media
- demonstrate responsible journalism
- demonstrate effective writing, design, and production techniques
- demonstrate fact-gathering, research, and writing skills necessary for in-depth reporting
- conduct an interview skillfully
- use a journalism style guide
- demonstrate effective writing, design, and production techniques
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Resources:
- access to a video camera
- access to video editing software
- access to computers
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Task Two - Continued . . .
In a television news room, everything must be organized. Each part of the news segment is indicated in its own unique way so that everyone involved is certain of his/her responsibilities.
For the purpose of your assignment, you will be a video journalist. This means you will videotape yourself rather than having a crew. While this means that you will not need to signal the anchor or the cameraperson, you will still need to format your script much like a traditional news script. To make everything simpler for you, create cues for yourself regarding narration, sound on tape, and voice over. This will help you keep everything straight as you are shooting and editing your tape.
Your script requires creative decisions regarding sounds and video footage. Each decision that you make is a choice about your story. As a journalist, you need to search through the information collected and determine what the public should know. Task Three - Weeding it Out
Once you have all your footage, you are ready to edit. As schools will have either Macintosh computers or machines that use Windows, there are a variety of different programs that may be used to edit videotape. Below are tutorials on the most commonly used editing software:
Macintosh
IMovie
Windows
MovieMaker
Pinnacle Studio
Take time to learn the basics of the editing software available to you and to edit your footage.
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As you edit, you are still making decisions about the story. Each piece you take out or leave in is a decision regarding the slant or angle of the story. |
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