A good radio journalist has to acquire various and often complimentary skills to both collect and collate the news, and to present the news to radio listeners. These skills are not often necessary in the same proportions or indeed at all in other media. These individual skills collectively are in many occasion essential pre-requisites for day to day operations for a journalist in the field of radio.
Skills a Radio Journalist Needs.
From getting the story in the first place, instigating the idea behind the story, researching, recording, introducing and editing the news item, the skills a radio journalist needs include:
- News editor: assembling the bulletin and the running order and content of the stories
- Reporter: collecting, investigating and balancing all the details
- Presenter: introducing and setting the scene for the news item
- Sound engineer: recording, editing and mixing all the recorded audio
- Voice over: voicing the news piece and adding any inserts, and interviews.
All these skills are obviously not always necessary and other people might help or complete the jobs necessary, but this will depend very much on the size of the radio station. The bigger the station, the more likely there will be specialisation of tasks, and conversely in smaller stations there will be fewer news personnel, and those newsroom staff will multi-task.
From Story Start to Broadcasting.
The process of getting a news story on- air, is essentially not very complex at all, and involves a few simple steps. As radio broadcasting is in essence at its best one person talking to another, all a radio journalist has to do is find a story, open a microphone and tell the story, or ‘The News.’
To make it more interesting for the listener(s), briefly all radio news broadcasters should be familiar with the steps to getting a story on-air, and to make the audio package more interesting. This will in some way involve the following process:
- Sourcing the story, the facts, and the people and incident(s) involved
- Researching the story, and getting a balanced view and presentation
- Pre-production, Interviewing, and Scriptwriting
- The production process, putting the story together editing and mixing the audio
- The News Broadcast or Bulletin and balancing the type and number of stories in the bulletin.
Different formats of radio stations and the demands of the listener will require varying types of news bulletins and this will determine the presentation style, the length of each item, and the whole way the news itself is presented.
Journalists in other media.
Although there are journalists working in the modern media of more recent times, the internet, blogging, on-line magazines and newspapers, the journalists’ role in the three main so far remaining traditional broadcast media occurs largely in Radio, TV and Press.
- TV: A TV journalist will often, although not always necessarily, have a team however small, to help her / him record both the film and sound recordings; this often involves a film camera crew and sound recordist looking after the technicalities of sound and picture, leaving the journalist more freely able to concentrate on interviewing any participant and the story, and its presentation. It’s very difficult to be simultaneously in front of the camera and behind it. Videophones are becoming more prevalent but they are again usually inserts to already controlled broadcasting output.
- Press: Typesetting and Typewriters are (mainly) a thing of the past and press journalists in more recent times have become more involved in typesetting, layout and the physical production of the newspaper. Electronic newspaper production requires the press journalist to be familiar with computers and digital imaging and the final layout of the paper far more than in the by-gone days of printing presses. But like their TV counterparts they still do not necessarily control the final output of the printed material. It would be very unusual for a single reporter to produce a newspaper however small.
The radio journalist on the other hand can record and produce the story from start to transmission, and is often the station’s supplier, censor and presenter of the story. The equipment is already in place, the radio station is broadcasting and once the audio is assembled, with a flick of switch, a push of button or the slide of a fader, the radio journalist can present the story, play the audio, and is on-air.
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