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.
Citing foreign press agencies
When citing a foreign wire service, I find it best to use an English language reference. Sometimes that’s the agency’s name in translation. “Agence France-Presse” (AFP) becomes “the French Press Agency,” and “Deutsche Presse Agentur” (DPA) becomes “the German Press Agency.” Or sometimes it’s the name in the original language, with an English description tacked on: “The Xinhua state-controlled news service,” in a story where it’s already established we’re talking about China. And note that, as in the last example, it’s important to indicate with a word or two (‘state-controlled’, ‘Christian conservative’, etc.) any possible bias a news service (or other source) might have.
‘Tory’ = Conservative
A ‘Tory’ is a member of the Conservative Party in Britain or Canada. This is not to be confused with a politician who is simply philosophically conservative (small ‘c’). It only applies to a member of the Conservative (big ‘C’) Party.
A quick summary of ‘summary judgment’
The Okeechobee School District has asked federal courts for a summary judgment on whether a Gay-Straight Alliance should be allowed to meet on the Okeechobee High School campus. –Port St. Lucie News, 30 Jan 2008 So what the heck is a ‘summary judgment,’ anyway? ‘Summary judgment’ is the term for a ruling in a civil lawsuit made by a judge, without a trial to establish facts. The premise is that there are no disputed material facts in the case, and that all the issues are legal ones. Obviously, the side that makes a motion for summary judgment wants the judgment to be in their favor....
Study, study, study
Intern Mallory just asked me, “What’s another word for ‘study’? I just used it three times in three sentences.” How about ‘report’ or ‘analysis’? ‘Survey’ sometimes works, too, if that’s mainly what it was.
Link of the Week: Newscript.com
Each week, I’m going to offer up one of the many web sites I’ve found over the years to assist me in research, fact-checking, or writing. Some will be gems you’ve never seen or heard of. Others will be commonplace sites everybody goes to, but for which I’ve found a special use or hidden feature that I’ll share. For my inaugural ‘Link of the Week,’ here’s one of the best all-around websites offering guidance on radio newswriting and delivery: Newscript.com The site is written and maintained by Ohio radio newsman Michael Meckler. It’s a tribute to the good, old fashioned broadcast newswriting values of clarity,...
One more way to ‘decentuate’ the appositive
There’s one other way to avoid appositives that I forgot to mention. You can make the noun and its description the subjects of two consecutive sentences, like so: The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says he’s now enjoying his retirement. John Shalikashvili left the top spot at the Pentagon in 1997… This works because English is highly asyndetic. That means the sentence structure carries much of the meaning, and so fluent speakers of the language understand how words, phrases and sentences relate to each other without the help of a lot of conjunctions and connective words. Thus it’s clear the subject of...