Searching online for an original source
While we’re on the subject of web searches… Sometimes I need to find the original source of a quote or news story (for example, that has been used without attribution or simply plagiarized by a blog). I’ve found that the easiest way is to use a randomly selected phrase from the source in hand that is long enough to be unique. So for example, if I found this quote somewhere online without attribution (or if the attribution was a blog that referenced another blog and so on): Lt. Brett Parson, who heads the D.C. police special liaison unit, said “Just like in heterosexual domestic cases,...
Links of the Week: Which county is that in?
Once in a while, you need to know which county a city is in (for example, because you need to call the county sheriff on a crime story), or conversely, which cities are in a particular county. One sometimes-handy tool for this is a Google maps mashup at maps.huge.info/county.htm. (Maps.huge.info also has a host of other useful data mapping tools: telephone area code boundaries, zip code boundaries, city boundaries, geocoders and reverse-geocoders) The only shortcoming to maps.huge.info’s county boundaries is that you must either already know the zip code of the county you’re looking for, or click in precisely the right location on a map...
More on using proper nouns for searching
Reviewing my last entry, I see that literal-minded readers may think that I’m saying that using a city name and last name are usually the best query terms. Not at all. Sometimes, if a last name is very unusual, that’s all you need. Often a first and last name together in quotes (or with a dash between them) is enough. (Although watch out for criminals, who for legal reasons are often identified with their middle name or initial.) If the first and last name are common (as in the case of ‘Larry King’), then throwing in a city name will help narrow it down. Other...
Searching online to supplement what you know
One task I often need to accomplish is supplementing a little bit of information I have in hand (a news tip, a blog entry, an offhand reference, a quote, a news brief) with much more detailed information (a full newspaper write-up, an earlier news clipping, a script from our own archives). This can be hard to do if you don’t know how to formulate the right query for an online search… or it can take mere seconds if you do. If you’re looking for a recent news story, then Google News is the right place to start. If you’re looking for general information or an...
Link of the Week: WorldTimeServer.com
Because Sirius OutQ News covers a lot of international LGBT news, we have stringers all over the world, and I constantly need to know what time it is where my correspondents are (don’t want to be ringing the phone in Melbourne at 3 a.m!). One of the tools I use to figure out the complications of calculating the time elsewhere (time zones, the international date line, daylight savings time) is WorldTimeServer.com. (I also use a piece of desktop software for my most commonly used time zones. More on that in a later entry.) WorldTimeServer provides the correct time anywhere in the world, taking daylight time,...
How much is that in real money?
One more thing about converting foreign currencies to local in news stories: Sometimes you can just convert the foreign amount and treat it as if it were local money. Soon Yen pays about a dollar-sixty to ride the bus into town every day. In other situations, where you’re talking about large cash amounts that would obviously have been transacted in the foreign currency, it’s wise to subtly signal that you’ve converted. Britain’s Royal Air Force has settled an anti-gay discrimination lawsuit, offering a payout to a former sergeant major worth more than 100-thousand dollars. The use of the word “worth” indicates that the settlement was...
Link of the Week: U.S. Military Ranks
I was never in the military (duh), so I find military ranks and insignia somewhat confusing — and they come up in OutQ News stories pretty often, because of gays in the military. Fortunately, there’s a handy website that not only shows all the ranks in the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force, in order, with their insignia, with officer ranks color-coded… it also provides their pay grade and puts it all in a tabular format so you can compare the ranks across services. It’s all on one convenient page of a website aimed at fans of Tom Clancy novels, movies, etc.: The Tom...
Get ‘thee’ gone!
For the last installment of my trilogy on delivery, I want to weigh in here against a bush-league mistake (in my opinion) that you still hear all over the place — sometimes even from experienced professionals. How many times have I cringed when I hear a supposed newsreader pronounce the indefinite article (“A thing”) as “Ae” (like the letter of the alphabet) and the definite article (“The thing”) as “Thee”? Nothing is more of a dead giveaway that you are reading (except of course for a “read-y” monotone). Native English speakers almost never pronounce the articles that way, which is to say, it ain’t conversational...
RIP: Tony Malliaris (1961-1995)
One of my first big schoolboy crushes was Tony Malliaris, back in middle school in Berkeley, California. I was a closeted gay nerd, he was the hot little Italian Greek stud on the M.L. King Junior Junior High campus. But he was always nice to me, which I appreciated a lot. After 9th grade, my family moved to nearby Oakland. I changed schools and pretty much lost track of Tony. But about ten years ago, I was watching a TV documentary on HIV, and imagine my shock at seeing that my old crush was now a proud, loud, gay activist with ACTUP. I tried finding...
Link of the Week: glbtq, the encyclopedia of gay culture
My job occasionally calls for research into a gay cultural topic. My first go-to source is always glbtq.com. This site bills itself as “the largest Web site devoted to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (glbtq) education and culture, (housing) the largest, most comprehensive encyclopedia of glbtq culture in the world.” Headquarted in Chicago, glbtq.com is most definitely not a wiki, but rather a genuine, edited encyclopedia, with more than 2,000 signed entries, and a editorial board of eminent gay academics.
An ounce of script preparation is worth a pound of oops
It’s all well and good, you may say, to wish for a varied and interesting delivery. But how do you actually create one? One technique many newsreaders use is to print out and mark up their scripts. Underline the words you want to punch. Circle dramatic phrases; box boring boilerplate. Or come up with your own system. Just the act of reading through the script asking yourself about each word and phrase will be helpful. As you grow more practiced, you may find you don’t need to print and mark your scripts. But no matter how long you’re in the business, it’ll always be useful...
Link of the Week: Yahoo! Currency Converter
Whenever you report a specific amount of money, you should always convert it to the currency your audience uses. Because I cover international gay news, I’m constantly having to convert foreign currency amounts to U.S. dollars. There are many, many online tools for this, but my favorite is the Yahoo! Currency Converter. By default, Yahoo’s tool converts Dollars to Japanese Yen, but this is not something I often need to do. But you can easily set the link you bookmark to your preferred default conversion. Just perform the desired default conversion and save that link. Now each time you click the link, it’ll be set...
It takes technique to sound conversational
Sounding conversational isn’t only the goal of news writing. It’s also integral to successful news reading, as well. But one of the paradoxes of sounding natural and interesting on the air is that it requires loads of technique. Rookie newsreaders just starting out (say, in college) typically read scripts pretty much the way they read aloud in high school classrooms, namely, in an uninflected, droning monotone. (Think Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “Bueller? Bueller?”) But in broadcasting, and especially in radio, you must grab an audience and keep its attention for one to five minutes or more with just your voice. Your ‘read’...
Don’t quote using “quote”
Our policy here at Sirius OutQ News is to signal a verbatim quote by using the word ‘quote’ only as an absolute last resort. It’s a mutation of the old newspaper reporter’s practice of barking copy, punctuation and all, down the phone line to the rewrite desk. It’s therefore corny and print-y; it impedes listener comprehension; and it’s miles from the conversational style we’re trying to achieve. Don’t do it. There are several good alternatives to the word ‘quote.’ In most cases, you can just do without it. Instead, signal the quote through a tiny pause and change to a slightly higher, more stressed intonation....
Link of the Week: Economist Country Briefings
Whenever I need a quick, authoritative summary of a country’s political, economic and social system, I turn to the Country Briefings at Economist.com. In addition to a listing of recent The Economist articles on the country, these briefings include a factsheet, economic data on the country, a short history of the nation, and summary descriptions of the country’s political and economic system. Not every country in the world is covered, but the 80 or so largest are.