Practical Journalism

Writing for radio 1. Introduction When writing a script for the radio, you should always bear one thing in mind: you are writing for listeners – not for readers. The listeners will only hear your text once and they will have to understand it immediately. Readers of a newspaper or an online article can read sentences that they do not understand two or three times. They can even look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. In addition, readers can process the information at their own pace. Some people are slow readers, others will just scan an article. In radio, however, the speed at which the listeners have to digest the information is determined by the speaker. And everyone has to listen to everything. Radio texts have to be well presented, logically structured and easy to understand. If listeners stumble over unfamiliar words or cannot follow your train of thought, you lose their attention. And even if the listeners are only disoriented for a mom

The Interview 1. Introduction In our daily lives, we all speak with other people – mostly to exchange information and to find out what’s new. And even if we are not aware of it: we are constantly conducting interviews. “How are you?” “Oh, not too good today.” “Why not, what’s wrong?” “I wanted to go on vacation, but I couldn’t.” “And why not?” “My wife is sick.” “What’s wrong with her?” etc. Such a “question-and-answer-game” is nothing unusual and we conduct it with ease in our everyday lives. So, why should conducting a radio interview be any different? After all, it is not difficult to ask questions and those who ask should also get answers. But in a journalistic interview this isn’t always the case. One crucial difference is the time factor. If we had all the time in the world, we could possibly get the answers to all the questions we have and find out everything we want to know. But in radio, the time we are given to get the releva