News Reading Tips for a TV News Reporter

Video Transcript

"BILL ALBIN: Hello, I'm Bill Albin. And on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to teach you what you need to know to be a local news reporter. In this clip, we're going to cover one of the four basic story types in news. The four are--quickly--readers, VOs, VOSOTs and packages. In this clip, we're going to talk about readers. Readers are exactly how they sound. You're just reading something. It's the story; it's just text. There's no video; there's no sound bites; there's no pre-packaged interesting things that we're going to throw in there. It's just me talking to you like I'm talking to you right now. But when you use something like this, well, you would use it when you don't have any video or when you don't have any sound bites. For example, if we're doing a story that's breaking news and we don't know a great deal about the story yet but we still want to make sure that the viewers are aware of what's going on, then we would do with the reader. And it could possibly be a live shot. So we're not to the scene with the truck or set up everything over there, the equipment, and I will just stand here and talk about what's around me. But there's no like video that will go over the story. There's no sound bites that will go over the story. It will be just the information that I received from whoever is on the scene dealing with that situation, and I will relate that situation to you, the viewer."