Topics we didn’t cover: News

Since I had wrote a mid-term paper, I didn’t need to do a final project, but I did think it would be fun to talk about news and radio—my two passions. I know we went over documentaries, and those are similar to news, but I think news has a few different aspects. The first of which is the time, for a long story you only have about 4-5 minutes of airtime max. This presents its own trials, what to keep and what to not show your audience. I ran into this problem yesterday when I was producing a package about the Cruz rally but only had 2.5 minutes to explain everything that had happen. The next challenge is the timeliness of the piece. Since FDN only covers the news once a week, everything we talk about needs to be accurate for the moment we go on air. This week of FDN was a challenge to present all the rallies FDN filmed but told it in a way that explained the final outcome. The final challenge that I find the most difficult is portraying everything in the right light. The last thing you want to do as a reporter is to report falsely, even if it is just displaying something in a false light. This is where news media tends to get a bad rap. Putting all of those factors together (and many other challenges) news becomes a race to the truthful finish with many challenges crazy deadlines and only a few minutes to show for it. It is wonderful.