Print Vs. Broadcasting

I remember going into my first college tour as a newly declared journalism major. It was a small college in Arkansa that barely held 1,600 students. I met with the dean of the journalism department, along with the other students attending the tour, and he asked me a question that defined my passion to be a journalist. He asked, “do you really want to be a journalist or just a ditzy blonde on TV that has everything written for her?”

I’m sure this comes as a shock, but i was immiedietely closed off to this school. I am not looking to be a broadcast journalist, but If this was thier attitude towards female journalists I wanted no part. This encouraged me to do some research of my own — what type of work goes into being a broadcast journalist versus a print journalist?

This brings me to the prompt today. There are many similarities bewteen broadcast writing and print writing, however they are outweighed. y the differences. First I will explain the two main points I picked up on during the class video, and then I will discuss my outside research.

1. Show don’t tell. This is something beaten into the brain of print journalists. Show the effects instead of saying there were affects. It makes it more impactful and allows for the reader to make up their own judgement. However, broadcast journalists are allowed to tell in some instances. When discussing the new number of cases the broadcast journalist said, “the numbers are staggering”. When in Print, we should show a difference in order for the reader to see that the numbers were indeed staggering.
2. Adjectives. I noticed an increase use of adjectives and imagry. In print we avoid adjectives and imagry mainly because they increase wordiness, and tend to show bias. However, adjectives and imagery are pleasant to the ear, therefore they are used in broadcast journalism. An example I heard yesterday was, “hitting the ground running”. I forget the context, but in print we would have used less dramatic dialogue to convey our message.

Now for some points I found through independent research.

1. Editing. There is more of an editing process in print journalism due to concision techniques. The editors are editing for accuracy. In broadcast writing, there is little editing but words are used more sparingly in order to fit within a time frame.
2. Immediate effect. Broadcast journalism hits the listener immiedietly, but could be lost within the week. Print on the other hand is always assessable.
3. Inverted pyramid. Print Journalism follows the inverted Pyramid and broadcast journalism, although prioritizes the most important information first it does not follow the inverted pyramid style, because they do not have to worry about information getting cut off during the editing process.

These were the main points that stuck out to me for the differences in broadcast writing and print writing.