Radio: The Headline Service

Radio: The Headline Service

• For the most up-to-the minute, quickest, and most frequent news, no medium does better than radio.

• Many stations carry news every 30 minutes or every hour, and large cities are served by one or more all news stations.

• Radio is available anywhere in the country. Radio can present news almost as it happens.

• A newspaper has to wait at least until the next edition. TV has to wait until the next scheduled newscast, unless there is a special report.

• Newsmagazines often provide the most detail about national stories but are a few days or a week behind the newspaper.

• There are currently three national news weeklies with a large circulation – Time, with over 4 ½ million readers; Newsweek, with over 3 million; and U.S. News and World Report with over 2 million.

• Newsmagazines report the news with a more entertaining and lively writing style than newspapers.

• They have more time to prepare in-depth stories because they are not under the pressure of putting out a newspaper every day.

• However, both Time and Newsweek, which are printed on Sunday, can publish a story about an important event that happened on Saturday, in time for the newsstand copies available Monday morning.

• Time is printed in a number of printing plants around the world and begins selling each edition on Sunday night and Monday morning in more than 150 countries.

How is it done?

• DJ’s are given news reports as they come in from a news service.

• Large news-radio stations in cities have news departments and reporters out looking for stories.

• Radio today serves best as a first alert for important news and as the best source for current weather and local traffic information.

• Newsmagazines provide the most retrievable form of news. Radio and TV news is gone once the show has ended.

• A listener or viewer cannot easily go back and check was was said or find the text of the news broadcast at a public library.

• A newspaper is more retrievable, but its size and inexpensive paper make it hard to store without the inconvenience and expense of microfilm.

• However, back issues of newsmagazines are available in any library or even on the coffee table or stacked in piles in the basement of thousands of homes.

• A newsmagazine also is on sale for at least a week, while an newspaper disappears from newsstands within 12 hours.

• Due to this longer sales period and the relative permanence of the newsmagazines, editors have developed a policy of stressing facts and checking their accuracy.

• Newsmagazines have full-time “checkers” who only job is to verify the facts reporters mention in their stories.

• The checkers are also charged with filling in facts that reporters leave out.

• A story might come to a check with a line such as “The 00-person Sudanese army…”

• It is up to the check to fill in the “00”.

SIDE B

SIDE A

What 5 characteristics of news does this contain?

• Other news media are careful about reporting facts accurately, but none treat important facts with the passion of newsmagazines.

• The presence of colorful facts is one of the aspects of newsmagazine writing that makes it different from newspapers.

• A newsmagazine story might being: “Flowers were in bloom on the crumbling towers of St. Hilaron and hawks turned soundlessly high about Kyrenia.”

• A newspaper story on the other hand would begin simply by noting: “Strife-torn Cyprus was reported quiet today with only sporadic outbreaks of shooting.”

• Newsmagazines present the news in the form of dramatic stories.

• Unlike newspapers, they have no tradition of reporting unbiased news and restricting opinions to columns and editorials.

• They often present opinionated news and interpretations of events, sometimes in articles signed by the writer.

• Newsmagazines present their opinions as part of the news.

• Newspapers keep opinion pieces separate.

• TV editorials are clearly labeled when they are presented by local news.

• TV editorials on the national level are usually found in TV documentaries.

• The presentation of news in a TV documentary is somewhat similar to that in a newsmagazine.

http://www.npr.org/sections/news/

Newspapers and Newsmagazines: In-Depth Coverage

• The ability of television to provide up-to-date evening newscasts has caused a decline in the number of evening edition newspapers.

• The decline began in 1977, and, during 1988 alone, 27 cities lost their daily evening newspaper.

• Since creating a physical newspaper can take some time, the news is at least a few hours old by the time the paper hits the street.

• Of all the news media, however, newspapers off the reader the greatest variety and the greatest personal choice.

• Each newspaper reader is his or her own editor, selecting the news that he or she thinks is important and ignoring what is not.

• Newspapers have been in the news business far longer than any of the electronic media and have the most people working on gathering and writing the news.

• Newspapers and newsmagazines provide the most in-depth reporting, while radio and television go into little detail.

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