COVERING SPEECHES, MEETINGS AND NEWS CONFERENCES [Autosaved] 2320.pdf

COVERING SPEECHES, MEETINGS AND NEWS CONFERENCES  As a reporter, regular places of assignment like meetings, speeches, and conferences may be major sources of news. Speeches Speeches are not the most exciting stories a reporter covers, but they are major part of your day-to-day work as a jou...

COVERING SPEECHES, MEETINGS AND NEWS CONFERENCES  As a reporter, regular places of assignment like meetings, speeches, and conferences may be major sources of news. Speeches Speeches are not the most exciting stories a reporter covers, but they are major part of your day-to-day work as a journalist. In writing a story from a speech, you need to find out the following: what was said, who spoke, name and identification, the setting or circumstances of the speech and any unusual occurrence. Any of these can provide the lead and the theme of the story, although most speech stories emphasise what was said.  Locate the theme The most difficult task you face on writing a story speech is finding the theme. A tipoff to the theme may be the title of the speech. Often, the speaker may pound the podium; raise their voice or suddenly slowing down the delivery to drive home their major points. Sometimes, the main point is in the summary at the end.  When you are not sure of the theme, try to interview the speaker after the talk. However, when combining material from a speech and an interview, you should tell the reader or listener where the information came from. Otherwise, those who attended the speech or heard it on radio or television will find the story puzzling.  Occasionally, you will find a lead in what the speaker considers the theme. Based on what you have been taught in news judgment, you should lead with what you consider the most important element but summarise high in the story what the speaker considers the major theme. A speech consists of spoken words and so must the story. Unless there is an incident during the talk that would make the circumstances and the setting the most newsworthy item, your story must emphasise what was said with ample quotations. Other important points to note when writing a story from a speech are to always commit the following to mind: A speaker usually makes a point and follows it with examples and supporting materials, then he/she moves on to another point, followed by illustrative materials and so on In doing so, the speaker moves toward a climax, which is usually at or near the end of the speech. The climax, however, is usually what can make the headline or lead in the story, so you must watch out for it. This however is not a hard-and- fast rule. The key point may be expressed within the speech, at the beginning or at the end. Never report a speech chronologically, like the minutes of a meeting. Avoid this sort of boring writing: “The speaker began by saying…” “Then she told the audience…” “Next, he pointed out…”  The speaker’s full identification (name, place of residence or employment, position, and so on), can be included in the lead, or immediately follow the lead. This identification should be as brief as clarity permits, yet as complete as possible. Giving the name or identity of the speaker especially when more than one speaker is named in the story is critical.  Dropping in the name or identity is often enough to remind readers or viewers who are saying what and that statements being reported are not the reporter’s opinion but are statements of the speaker being quoted.  Present the story with fairness. It may be tempting to praise the speaker, especially if you agree with the person. Avoid it. Do not use adjectives that hint at how you feel (such as value-laden words like ‘well-known’ or ‘prominent’ or ‘beautiful’). Just tell the story about what was said and let your audience draw its own conclusions. Quote in accurate, the exact words. A quotation is that, statement of the speaker’s exact words. Things to guard against when writing from a speech are: Watch spelling of names. Names of speakers and guests sometimes have unusual spellings, so always ask for correct spellings. Do not assume. If you are not sure about the names, ask about the guest list or ask around. Avoid the use of trade names of firms, products, and other special usages Edit your own story. Catch the mistakes before someone else does. You are your own editor since you know what you mean.  Write an appealing lead. Get the audience interested. However, be careful about leads that do not even summarise the main points of the speaker/speech. Pay attention to organisation. Generally, it is best to organise the story in an inverted pyramid fashion. Get the facts straight. Do not confuse the audience with contradiction. Check everything. Do not assume.  Watch out for vagueness. Avoid using words that have unclear meanings in the context used. Say exactly what you mean. Write what is necessary. Watch stories that are particularly short. If a story is short, ask yourself if you have included sufficient explanation and detail to tell the story correctly. If it is a particularly long story, ask yourself if you have been wordy or redundant.  Support all generalisations. Present direct quotations, sound bites, actualities, and paraphrases about the points the speaker made with direct quotations. If you said the speaker was hostile towards the audience, quote him/her saying something to indicate that. It helps to drive home your point. Ask the speaker questions. If something said in the speech was muddled to you, then find the speaker afterward to ask. If you cannot find the speaker, ask someone else in an authoritative position to explain things to you. Meetings Meetings provide newspapers and broadcast stations with enormous amounts of stories. Public bodies such as school boards, city councils, legislatures, directors of corporations, shareholders and private groups conduct much of their business at open meetings. To get good stories from meetings, you need to check the clips to get past stories on subjects the meeting will consider, obtain the agenda ahead of time, and write out questions for interviews. At the meeting, look for the offbeat and unusual and think about the people affected by a decision or policy. Let the following points guide you in writing the story: major business transacted voters’ decisions adoption of policies; purpose, time and location of the meeting items on agenda length of session quotes from witnesses and experts unusual departures from agenda agenda for next session. To be able to write a complete meeting story, Garrison (1990) points some time- tested tips to make things easier: Get oriented. When you get the assignment, find out what you can about the organisation that has called the meeting. Get to the point. What is the most important part of the meeting that will be important to the audience? Do your homework. Do some research in advance. Get the agenda for the meeting  Get briefed. Some organisations will hold media briefing sessions in advance of a major meeting. Attend this if you can. At least, make some calls in advance to key individuals to get an idea of what may occur. Arrive early. After you know what to expect, go to the meeting with time to spare. Look around. Check for telephones, lights, sounds, etc  Find official sources. The members of the organisation holding the meeting are your key sources. Be keen to catch for ‘a few words’ before, during or after the meeting. Find the real sources. Not every member of the organisation is competent enough to give you information, so find members or people outside the organisation that would provide information on the subject of the meeting. Take good notes. Do not rely on a tape. Make sure your notebook is handy and write down as much as possible.  Listen for quotations and sound bites. A meeting story can be very dull, so try to liven it up with quotations and sound bites from debates and discussions during the meeting among the key players. Quotations will help your story get specific when you might be writing generalisations about what occurred. Focus on action. In the end, ensure that your story focuses on the action of the meeting.  Decide how to write it. In writing your story, most meetings are best written in a summary style with the inverted pyramid structure Roundup approaches work. Don’t forget contact numbers. You must try to get numbers of key contacts who you can call and get additional information. Stories About News Conferences  News conferences are like speeches, except that the questions reporters ask after a news conference are often more important than the prepared comments the speaker makes. The answers to those questions are an important part of the story—and sometimes are the story. Consider news reports after the president conducts a news conference. His prepared remarks often are less interesting than his answers to the press.  Do your homework. Before or after the news conference, research the issue. If the conference is about a local crime, check files or background to provide perspective. How many other crimes of this nature have occurred? If the conference is about a city issue, how does the information affect your readers and viewers? Don’t just recite the news; interpret it so that your audience can understand how the issues affect them. Stories about news conferences must include the following information: Person or people who conducted the news conference Reason for the news conference and background Highlights of the news, including responses to questions Location, if relevant  Reaction from sources with similar and opposing points of view Stories about news conferences are like most other news stories. Although reporters’ questions may prompt the most interesting information, the answers are usually incorporated into the story without references such as “In response to a question” or “When asked about....” The main elements for coverage of a news conference are included in this story: Stories About Meetings The decisions that affect readers’ daily lives—such as where they take their trash, get their water and send their children to school—are made by local government officials at meetings. Yet meeting stories are often written without explaining their real impact on the reader. Countless surveys conducted by news organizations reveal that local news is near or at the top of the list of the kinds of stories readers want. They just don’t read them all the way to the end. Sometimes they don’t read past the lead, especially when the lead is dull.  The stories don’t have to be boring. They may not be as compelling as a story about a murder trial. But they can be written with flair and with an emphasis on the meeting’s significance to readers. All states---provinces--- have open-meeting laws requiring officials who have the authority to spend public funds to conduct their business in public. These boards may conduct executive sessions behind closed doors for certain discussions, such as personnel matters or collective bargaining, but all decisions must be made in a public meeting. Understanding the System When a board makes a decision at a meeting, you need to understand what kind of authority that board has. If you are covering meetings of your university administration, find out who can make the decisions and which boards are advisory. Who can raise the tuition—school officials or a board of regents? Is the action taken at a meeting a recommendation or a ruling? You need to explain the system as well as the next step in an action.  Writing the Advance Many times, knowing what is going to happen at a meeting is more important to readers than knowing what did happen. A story that tells readers what is being proposed can alert residents to make their concerns known before a measure is adopted by local officials. A pre-meeting story is called an “advance.”  An advance is especially crucial if local officials are planning to conduct a public hearing about an issue. If the public doesn’t know about it, how can the public be heard? City and school boards usually publish an agenda in advance of their meetings. This agenda lists the items to be discussed, although new items can and usually are presented.  When you receive an agenda, look through it for items that might be of special interest to readers. Call board members and ask for comments, or ask them to pick out the items they expect to be most interesting or controversial. If the issue has previously been in the news, check clips and call other interested parties.  The point of your advance is to inform readers about items that they may want to discuss during the public comment part of a meeting or just to let readers know what their officials are proposing. If you are writing an advance for a public hearing, make sure that you give the time and location of the hearing. Covering the Meeting Arrive early. Find out the names of board members (usually they have nameplates), and find out who is in charge. Ask board members, especially the head of the board, if you could talk to them after the meeting. If you know people in the audience who are leaders of a group favouring or opposing a controversial issue, greet them and tell them you would like to get comments after the meeting.  Check items on the agenda, and get any background that you need. Check the consent agenda, a list of items on the agenda that the board will approve without discussion. They may include bids for approval or other points the board may have discussed in work sessions. A “gem” of a story may be buried in the consent agenda.  One reporter wondered why the school board had approved $30,000 in “token losses.” That’s a lot of money to be considered “token” losses. She discovered that it represented losses of bus tokens that the school board sold to students who had to ride public buses because there were no school buses in the city. Why $30,000 in losses? The school district had no system of monitoring the sales, and the money had been stolen at several schools. By school officials! The board didn’t want to discuss this item publicly, so it was buried in the consent agenda. But the reporter wanted to discuss it. In a front-page story.  Don’t remain glued to a seat at a press table. When members of the audience give public comments, get their names and more comments. Many times they will leave immediately after their testimony. Follow them out of the meeting. You can catch up with the action inside later. Or sit in the audience.  Sometimes the comments of people attending the meeting are more interesting than the ones the board members make. Stay until the end, unless your deadline prohibits staying. The most important issue could emerge at the end of a meeting when the board asks for new business or public comments. Or something dramatic could happen. The mayor could resign. Violence could erupt. You never can tell, especially if you’re not there.  Writing the Story First, how not to write it: Do not say the city council met and discussed something. Tell your readers or listeners what they discussed or enacted. This is the kind of lead to avoid: The 41st Annual Environmental Engineering Conference met yesterday at the Kansas Union to discuss solutions to environmental problems. Representatives of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, the Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations spoke to about 180 people who attended the conference.  So what did they say? This lead reveals nothing. Some meetings are long. They can be boring. Avoid telling the reader how much you suffered listening to board members drone on and accomplish nothing in a long meeting. The reader doesn’t care how much you suffer. The reader wants the news. If the length of the debate is crucial to the story, you should include it. But if the meetings are usually long and the time element is not a major factor related to the focus, don’t mention it.  Here are some points to include in your story: Type of Meeting and Location: Give this information, but if the city council or school board meets all the time in the same building, don’t mention the location. The Vote on Any Major Issue: For instance, say “in a 4-1 vote....” If the issue is particularly controversial, say who voted against it—or for it, if an affirmative vote was more controversial. If the measure was approved unanimously, say so. However, don’t give the vote for every minor item. The Next Step: If a major issue or ordinance cannot be adopted until a public hearing is conducted, tell readers when a hearing is scheduled or what the next step is before the action is final.  Impact on Readers: Explain how the decision will affect them. Quotes: Use only quotes that are dramatic, interesting or crucial to the story. Background of the Issues: What do readers need to know to understand what has happened?  To write the story, select one key issue for the focus. If the board approved several other measures, add them at the end: “In other business.” If several important actions occurred, consider breaking another key issue into a separate story, if possible. If not, try a lead mentioning both items, or put the second key point in the second paragraph and give supporting background later, after you have developed the first point—for example, “City commissioners yesterday approved plans for the city’s first shopping mall but rejected plans for a new public golf course.” Then proceed with the discussion about the shopping mall.  Consider advancing the story with a second-day lead, also known as an updated lead. This kind of advance tells readers what the next step is or how the story will affect them. In most newspapers, this type of lead is becoming more popular because it makes the news more timely. However, it is optional, and a first-day lead may be acceptable. For broadcast, however, an updated lead is crucial. Viewers don’t want to know what happened yesterday or last night; they want to know what is happening now.  If your story will appear first on the Web, you also have to consider updating the lead for a print publication that will be published the next morning. Although many meeting stories are written with summary leads, especially if the news is significant, they do not have to follow that form. If you think a softer lead is appropriate for the type of news that occurred, you can use it. Try an impact lead that emphasizes how readers and viewers are affected by the action or lack of action that occurred at a meeting.  Here are a few matters of style for meeting coverage: Board is a collective noun and therefore takes a singular verb: The board discussed the issue at its meeting, not their meeting. If this approach seems awkward in your story, say that the board members said their next meeting would be Tuesday. Capitalize city council, city commission and school board when they are part of a proper name—such as the Rockville City Commission— and when the reference is to a specific commission in your town—the City Commission. If you are not referring to a specific city commission but just saying most municipalities have city commissions, use lowercase letters.  Capitalize the titles of board members or other officials when they come before the name, as in Mayor John Corrupt. If the title follows the name—John Corrupt, the mayor—use lowercase letters. For votes, use 3-1, not 3 to 1. Stories about meetings can take a hard, soft or advance-impact approach. Whichever one you use, make the story relevant to readers. Here’s how: What Do You Think What are the main problems with stories about local government meetings? Lack of impact Boring leads Lack of interesting information Other—specify  LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.—Despite neighbours’ objections, a North Laguna Beach couple were given permission Tuesday to adorn their home with a 17-foot-high outdoor sculpture of 30 water heaters and two house trailers. The City Council, after viewing a scale model of the artwork, voted 3- 1 to endorse the sculpture. It will climb around a pine tree in the back courtyard of Arnold and Marie Forde’s home. Summary lead: what happened Vote