Preface Broadcasting Handbook: Tuggle
Preface Broadcasting Handbook: Tuggle
Preface Broadcasting Handbook: Tuggle
BROADCAST NEWS
HANDBOOK
WRITING, REPORTING, AND PRODUCING
IN A CONVERGING MEDIA WORLD
S
C. A. Tuggle
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill
Forrest Carr
WFLA-TV
Suzanne Huffman
Texas Christian University
www.mhhe.com
DEDICATIONS
From C. A. Tuggle
To my wife Tracey and children Brynne, Bethany, and Jenny, and to the
memory of my father, T. B. Tuggle, my inspiration to always do my
best.
From Forrest Carr
To the memory of Bruce Breslow, a good friend and the finest photojournalist I have ever known.
From Suzanne Huffman
To my husband August F. Schilling III and to my parents, Carrol Statton Huffman and Margaret Anne Byrd Huffman.
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newsroom positions throughout the South and Southwest. Her academic research centers on the practice of broadcast journalism and her
research articles have been published in Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and other academic journals. Dr. Huffman is co-author
with Dr. Judith Sylvester at Louisiana State University of Women Journalists at Ground Zero: Covering Crisis, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2002, about the experiences of women journalists who covered
the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. She is a contributing
author to Indelible Images: Women of Local Television, published by Iowa
State University Press in 2001.
FOREWORD
Bob Dotson
Senior Correspondent
NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw
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PREFACE
Dana Rosengard
University of Memphis
Broadcast news was born in the 20th century as radio and television
developed in the United States. Radio was something of a gadget at
first. Radio, or wireless telegraphy, was a technological improvement
compared to the wired telegraph that was widespread in the mid1800s. Telegraph lines were vulnerable because they could be cut, but
that wasnt a problem with wireless. Guglielmo Marconis experiments with a wireless telegraph in 1890s Europe led to the invention
of radio. Early wireless equipment was installed on ships at sea so that
they could stay in touch with each other and with the shorea better
system than flashing lights and flags. The sinking of the White Star
Line luxury liner Titanic in 1912 drew attention to the new invention
and led to more widespread use of it.
By the 1920s, individuals were tinkering with radio at home and
experimenting with what we know today as broadcast programming.
In those days, the programs were broadcast live and might consist of
sermons, musical performances, news headlines, election returns, or
play-by-play of sporting events. Filling hours of time every day with
live programming was problematic and station owners began to work
out ways to share programs with each other. Early networks of radio
stations began to form. Station owners were often individuals who were
exposed to radio at schools or newspapers or department stores who
decided to start tinkering with radio in their spare time. Visionaries
such as David Sarnoff at RCA/NBC predicted that radio would
become a household utility and he was right. Radio quickly became
a popular mass medium, and millions of individuals bought sets for
their homes. Radio was both an entertainment and a comfort to Americans in the years of the Great Depression and the First and Second
World Wars. Listeners grew to recognize and trust the voices of
reporters such as Edward R. Murrow at CBS.
Television was already in development in the 1920s when radio
became popular in the U.S., but the economic depression and the wars
overseas delayed its introduction. By the late 1940s and early 1950s,
television stations were going on the air, Americans were beginning to
buy television sets for their homes, and programs that had been popular on the radio moved to television. So did the network programming system. Early television programs were broadcast live and might
consist of cooking shows, comedy acts, news headlines, election campaigns, and sporting events.
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Preface
Talk about television was everywhere in the early 1950s, and the
emergence of the medium was one of the defining elements of the
decade. The actual invention and mechanical processes that would
become the television known to the postWorld War II generation go
back to 1884 and German inventor Paul Nipkow, but it was not until
1923 that a man named Vladmir Zworykin, who started at Westinghouse and then switched over to RCA, developed the iconoscope
(from the Greek words eikon [image] and skopein [to view]). This
device aimed a beam of electrons across a target that had been charged
by light imprinting on it. What he had developed was, in effect, a camera tube. He also developed the kinescopethe TV picture tube. It
gave off a phosphorous glow with the electron stream. Together, his
inventions became the television we watch today.
But because of the initial production costs and the interruption of
World War II, it took a few decades (until the 1950s) for television to
truly arrive and begin sweeping the nation. Television set ownership
grew nearly 700 percent between 1950 and 1955, from 4.6 million to 32
million receivers.
Television news programming in the early 1950s came in the form
of sponsored 15-minute evening broadcasts. NBCs John Cameron
Swayzes Camel News Caravan and CBSs Television News with
Douglas Edwards fought the technological demands of the new and
growing medium and fought one another. Edwards led in the ratings
until NBC introduced The Huntley-Brinkley Report in 1956. In 1963,
CBS punched back, expanding its nightly network newscast to 30 minutes, incorporating longer reports and more film, and featuring an
interview with President John F. Kennedy on the premiere expanded
version of the broadcast.
Less than three months later, November 22, 1963, is the day most
believe television news came of age, and the new CBS news star, Walter Cronkite, bore the burden of being under the bright lights on that
dark day. People sat glued to their television sets through days of
national mourning as Cronkite reported the assassination of President
Kennedy. As news came in from Dallas by telegraph and telephone,
Cronkite brought the scenes from Texas as well as the procession in
Washington to the American public hour after hour after hour, almost
four nonstop days of coverage. Cronkites broadcast of the Kennedy
funeral and events surrounding it signified the growing power of television news and helped propel Cronkite to his most trusted man in
America title.
A big part of the power of the new medium was its ability to bring
word of events from across the world and country as well as from
across the town and region right into the American living room. In
many ways, local television news is the most visible element of the
local station in U.S. broadcasting. The news at the local level devel-
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A university professor once noted that a student told him she decided
to study broadcast journalism rather than print journalism because she
didnt like to write that much. It is, of course, a misconception that
there isnt much writing in broadcast journalism. Anchors and
reporters dont just stand (or sit) in front of a camera or microphone
and pour forth interesting information. To understand the real world
of broadcast journalism is to learn the step-by-step process involved.
Good writing is the heart of that process.
Pioneer stations put news on the air to inform their viewers, to
build their audiences, and to sell radio and television sets. Decades
later, changes in corporate ownership, the unrelenting need for corporations to generate profits for their shareholders, and a series of corporate mergers have led some news managers to talk about
convergence in their newsrooms. What this means can vary, but it
broadly suggests that reporters in the 21st century would be wise to
prepare themselves to write not only for broadcast, but for the Web
and newspapers as well.
Our Approach
With Broadcast News Handbook, our goal is to teach aspiring broadcast or
cross-platform journalists how to write, how to craft the language, and
how to be effective storytellers using all the technology available to
them without letting technology drive the process. Together, we have
more than 50 years of broadcast journalism experience. In the final two
decades of the 20th century, we saw many technological advancements
that affected how news is covered: videotape, microwave and satellite
technology, digital editing, and the list could go on. Technology has
changed and will continue to change. But the need to be an effective
storyteller hasnt changed, and wont. Regardless of what the tools are,
those who can use those tools well to impart interesting information
will always have a place in journalism. Foremost among those tools is
the language itself. We dont buy into Marshall McLuhans contention
that the medium is the message. We think the message is the message
and the medium is simply a means to get that message to an audience.
Technology and journalism are intimately connected in radio, television, and online applications, but content must always drive which stories are selected for coverage and how theyre covered.
Who Will Benefit from the Book
Weve tried to construct a text that will be useful to beginning broadcast journalism students as well as to those who have advanced in
their college training and education and even to those who have entered
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
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Contents
CHAPTER 11
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