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Step by Step Guide to Write a News Script -How to Write News Script

Every kind of writing has its own structure and rules and despite having good writing skills if you don’t follow the rules and structure of writing then your writing won’t be effective and persuasive. In this article, I will tell you the step-by-step guide to write a news script from the fundamentals through the end.

Step by Step Guide to Write a News Script

Initially, before you write a news script you need to know what makes the story news worthy, the aspects, and what kind of stories you’re going to report about.

What Makes a Story News Worthy?

To make your story newsworthy for your viewers or listeners make sure to focus on the following aspects before you write a story.

Timeliness:

Timeliness is very important and the news is always talking about a specific time, talking about what’s happening now so something that’s news today may not be news tomorrow and depends on what happens tomorrow. Hence, always keep that in mind timeliness is very important.

Proximity:

Proximity is also very important for example if there’s a car accident here, it’s not going to affect the people who are in other places or another country so you’re not going to talk about that somewhere else.

Impact or Consequence:

Think about the impact or consequence of your report and how it’s going to affect people, in addition, think of novelty or rarity. If something rare happens which is not very well know especially in the are so report about that on time.

Conflict:

Conflict such as crime, robbery, murder and etc.

Human Interests:

Before you write a story of news, think about it whether people are going to be interested in it. Write about what your audience is interested in and what they want to hear.

Prominence:

Prominence means the state of being important, famous, or noticeable that you have to focus on meanwhile writing.

News Broadcast Script Sample for Students

What to Include in News Story: The Five W’s

When you write a news story you should know what to include and what to cover in the story to make it interested for your audience. Here I am going to talk about the Five W’s that are significant when writing a news story.

1. Who:
Who will always talk about what is the story about and whenever you’re talking
about somebody you’ll always say their name and age. Remember to say their age first and then their name.

2. What:
When you mentioned who the story is about and then you will say what it’s about in the news. Sometimes you’ll say what it’s about before you’ll talk about who it’s about, depending on how important the story is because you want to capture your audience’s attention.

3. Where:

The location or place where did the event happened just like the proximity mentioned above. This is very essential to distinguish where this happened in case people who live around the area will care about it.

4. When:

Timeliness is the key in news reporting. Mentioning the exact time when the action happened and reporting it on time.

5. Why:

Why is this relevant to everybody, why are they going to care about this story, and is it gonna affect them? This also goes hand in hand with proximity and with impact as well.

General News Script Rules

  • Each television news script should range from 20-40 second max. Depending on the story and amount of the newscast and normally newscasts are about 30 minutes, sometimes an hour but they just rewrap it twice.
  • Imagine each line is 2 seconds (not including the SOT)
  • Always speak in an active voice, not a passive voice.
  • Always tease the story first.

Common News Script Commands

  • VO: Voiceover (A voice-over is a narration done by a broadcast reporter, usually reading from a script)
  • SOT: Sound on tape (SOT is generally considered to be audio captured from an individual who is on camera, as an interviewee, and may also be referred to as a soundbite.)
  • PKG: Package (A package is a self-contained taped news report. Usually, the news anchor will read an introduction live, then the pre-recorded story will be shown. A common part of a news package is the appearance of a reporter talking into the camera.)
  • CG: Computer graphics or character generator (A character generator, often abbreviated as CG, is a device or software that produces static or animated text (such as news crawls and credits rolls) for keying into a video stream. Modern character generators are computer-based, and they can generate graphics as well as text.)

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