A media house needs to be continually assessing whether its output is meeting the needs of the audience and achieving business targets.

This starts in the newsroom and filters through to every area of the organisation.

News is a classic people business: one relatively small set of people passes on information to another larger set of people.

There is a lot of other stuff going on, of course: newsgathering, writing, photography, technology, distribution, business and so on. But in the end it’s one person telling stories to other people.

We know that every human being is different from every other human being and not surprisingly every news boss is different from every other news boss. They all have their own ways of doing things and there is no single formula for success. A lot depends on personality.

But there are some things that are common to every good newsroom and continuous, critical review of its own output is one of them.

In the absence of a formula for the news review process, here are some things a news boss should keep in mind.

• You have to care deeply and passionately about the output. 
  • This means reading, listening or watching everything that comes out of the newsroom and assessing whether it is up to standard.
• You have to convey your enthusiasm to your team.
  • They have to know you are closely interested in all their work. Your enthusiasm will rub off on them, with positive results.
• You set the standards for all to follow.
  • You should work out some simple messages that you keep repeating. For example:
    • The most important quality of every story coming out of this newsroom is accuracy. We don’t accept ANY errors.
    • We all have opinions but when you come to work here, you leave your personal opinions at home.
    • We keep notes on EVERYTHING. We can’t defend a story if you can’t produce your notes.
    • We always try to be fair and straight with everyone, from the subject of our stories to our readers and our colleagues.
    • We don’t just report on a community, we are part of that community and we cannot serve the community unless we understand it intimately
• You never let an error pass unnoticed.
  • This is the single most important element of quality control. If one of your team makes a mistake and nobody mentions it, it means either you didn’t see it or you don’t care. This is demotivating for staff. You must at least talk to them about it.
• Deliver your critical messages wisely.
  • The old days of quality control by means of a fierce telling-off are over. You can be stern and disapproving without bullying. You can also understand that the best journalists are their own fiercest critics. They already feel bad about their error and you don’t need to rub their noses in it. Simply noticing that you are disappointed in them will be enough of a penalty.
• Praise and criticism should be dished out judiciously.
  • We expect a consistently high level of competence so high praise should be reserved for work that is exceptional. Similarly, though, there will always be mistakes, they should be rare and criticism should be proportionate.
• Critical review needs to be systematic, not haphazard.
  • There needs to be a structure, a regular routine of looking back and assessing what has gone right and what has gone wrong. The existence of the routine is a guarantee that important messages will not get overlooked in the pressure of the daily news cycle.
• There should be short-term review meetings.
  • In day-to-day operations, my own preference was to start the morning news meeting with a brief review of what we had done the previous day, before continuing on to plan the day’s coverage. If there was something too sensitive or too important to be raised at that meeting, I would ask the relevant people to stay behind for further discussions.
• There should be long-term review meetings.
  • You need to take a step back, every now and then to look, not just at individual stories, but also at how well you are covering issues. What important themes are you missing? Do you have the right staff to produce the coverage that circumstances require? Are you publishing in the right places and on the right platforms? And so on. I remember attending a meeting in 1975 and my editor suddenly saying: “I’ve realised we did not adequately cover the revolution in Portugal last year.” He explained that if we had thought more carefully about it at the time, we would have spotted the implications of Portugal abandoning its colonies, the result of which was to embolden revolutionary movements throughout Southern Africa.
• Include the competition in your reviews.
  • You should not assess your organisation’s performance in isolation.It’s no good if you did a pretty good job but your competitors did a better one. Did they have stories you missed? Were they first with the news? Did they think more creatively about how to handle a particular story? Were their headlines better? Always tell your own staff that you will never accept being anything less than number one in your market.
• You need to identify and understand your audience.
  • A great British newspaper editor in the middle of the 20th Century told his staff they were writing for “the man on the Clapham omnibus and the woman on Rhyl promenade.” He went on to say these imaginary folk represented ordinary people who were interested in improving their lives, owning their own homes and getting on in the world. This is similar to the modern technique of audience segmentation. It helps you to know what kind of stories your audience is interested in, and where they go to get their information. You cannot have too much information about your audience.
• A news organisation that goes broke is no use to anyone.
  • The news media is frequently under financial pressure and many titles have disappeared in the past 20 years. The editorial output of the news must be consistent with a viable and sustainable business strategy. So there should be regular reviews, with the relevant business colleagues, about how the news operation can play a part, within its existing ethical and editorial standards, in ensuring the success of the business.
• Review your own performance.
  • You expect your staff to be self-critical and you should do the same. At the end of every day, ask yourself: did I do everything I could to make today’s output as good as possible? If not, did I miss any obvious chances? Did I deal with everybody fairly and professionally? Did I inject a bit of fun into proceedings, to alleviate tension and make everybody feel better?

Bob Eggington

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The post Reviewing news output is essential first appeared on Media Helping Media.

In this article we look at the steps involved in creating a news and current affairs programme based on the needs of the target audience.

Essentially, a radio news and current affairs programme has four main format types. These are:

• The interview
  • This is where the presenter interviews someone in the news. It could be about the main story of the day.
  • If it is the most important story this interview would take place immediately after the main news bulletin.
  • It should be between around five minutes long, although this could be stretched to 10 depending on the seriousness of the topic.
  • There will also be shorter interviews throughout the programme.
• The reporter package
  • A package will be put together by a reporter or correspondent and will include a number of clips of people the journalist has interviewed.
  • A package will typically be about three and a half minutes long and contain three or four clips.
  • Each clip will be about 20 to 30 seconds long. The package can be pre-recorded or live.
• The two-way
  • This is where the presenter interviews a reporter or correspondent covering a story.
  • It is designed to tap into the journalist’s background knowledge of the story being covered and is sometimes used before a main interview.
  • A two-way can vary from between 90 seconds to five minutes depending on the importance of the subject matter.
  • It is different in tone from interviews with outside contributors.
  • When the presenter is interviewing someone from outside on a big story, the tone will often be adversarial, pressing the interviewee on important points.
  • In a two-way with a reporter, the presenter is simply trying to draw out the most important facts in a neutral tone.
• The vox pop
  • This is a mix of clips from members of the public who are giving their reactions/opinions on a news story. This should be no longer than three minutes long.
  • It should contain a variety of perspectives so that the audience can hear diverse opinions.

Structure of a current affairs programme

The main purpose of the show is to cover the news and get reaction to it. So the main ingredients are news bulletins, with interviews and longer reports about the individual news items.

There is more to it than that.

There will also be other information vital to the listener, including weather forecasts and sports news, plus perhaps business news, summaries of what is in the newspapers, programme trails for the rest of the network and so on.

These all need to fit together in a regular pattern, so that with familiarity, the listener gets to understand how the programme works. You can think of this as arranging the furniture of the show.

You will probably want your main news bulletins to happen on the hour, perhaps with summaries on the half hour. These are the first fixed points.

The weather and the sports news should also happen at exactly the same time each morning – just as they appear in the same place every day in a newspaper.

The audience likes predictability in the way the content is presented, so that they know when to tune in for the information in which they are most interested.

When you are happy with your programme structure, the task for the production team every day is to think about how the news stories and interviews fit in.

Running order

Every edition of the show works to a running order. A rough running order is produced at the very first programme meeting and then modified and updated as the day and the night develop.

The following is a rough outline for a two-hour-long radio news and current affairs programme.

Exploiting content for maximum impact

Your production team should include at least one person monitoring the live output being produced by the programme.

This person is looking for newsworthy clips to package for the news summaries on the half hour and the main bulletins on the hour, and to illustrate live studio debates.

Your programme needs to be a breaking news production line, continually delivering original newsworthy clips.

This production role should also share all the breaking news clips from across all output and on all appropriate social media channels.

Creating a programme trailer

In order to attract new listeners, you need to create compelling programme trailers to advertise the material to be broadcast in the following morning’s programme.

This is essential, and has to be factored into the daily work pattern. The trailer must promote the main story of the day; the one in which you are planning to invest most resources.

Creating the sort of trailer that will stop people in their tracks and make them pay attention can help win over new listeners, introduce them to the subject matter to be covered on your programme, and, hopefully, encourage them to spread the word by mouth and social media.

A promo trailer should be around 30 seconds maximum, the shorter the better. You want to grab attention. Give the audience a snippet of what is coming up. You don’t want to give them too much, but just enough that they think “I must tune in tomorrow to hear more about that”.

And you want your trailer to be shareable on social media, so the better it is, the more chance it has of going viral. Ask yourself would you share the trailer with your friends? If not, work on it some more. And keep working on it until you think it has the quality to go viral.

Recipe for a good trailer

So how do you create an attention-grabbing radio trailer? Here are a few suggestions.

Encourage your reporter and producers to always be alert to an audio clip that sets out the scale of the issue, but doesn’t give the solution.

For example, you might be doing a story about the rural economy and how people are struggling to survive.

You will have interviewed farmers and villagers. One might say something along the lines of “I didn’t know how I would survive”. Such a quote will make the audience want to know what happened next. What did the interviewee do to survive? Could it be relevant to the listener’s own predicament?

That clip is less than five seconds long, yet it is likely to resonate with thousands of people in a similar position. Of course your piece will no doubt have examined the issues the farmers and villagers face, and you will probably have covered how they coped. But save that for the programme.

The next trick is to package that clip, and perhaps another, with a carefully crafted text that explains WHY people MUST tune in to your programme in order to learn more.

Calls to action

The wording is important.

You could use ‘calls to action’ where your trailer invites the audience to ‘listen’, ‘take part’, and ‘assess’.

Words that suggest drama work well, such as ‘revealed’, ‘for the first time’, ‘life and death decision’.

But you must remain honest. You are in the business of facts not fiction. Never exaggerate.

Another benefit of trailers is that it could encourage your competition, both broadcast and print, to tune in so they can follow up your story. And that’s a good thing. You want them to be following your lead, you want to be known as the station that sets the news agenda. Because by the time they have heard your news item you will have already moved the topic by inviting guests to respond live on-air.

Because trailers should be part of your daily output, you should probably consider creating a template so that it can be used every day.

Something like:

“In tomorrow’s morning programme we will be looking at (here you can mention up to three items), and we will be talking to xxxx about xxxx (insert short clip here).”

The post Creating a current affairs programme first appeared on Media Helping Media.