|
Media Ideas Media Development Solutions www.mediaideas.co.uk e-mail Media Ideas
about
|
solutions
|
clients
|
resources
|
news
|
home
|
||
|
Tutorial
Multiplatform Authoring How to write news once for multiple outlets This tutorial will show you how to write a news story in a way that will enable your journalism to be used across multiple platforms (devices), including the Web, WAP-enabled phones, SMS news alerts, TV text, digital text, broadband text services and news on plasma screens as well as also providing the basic text for radio and TV news scripts. The system relies on character limitations. These limitations have been added to all the fields in the practice area below. Characters are the letters and spaces in your text. These are enforced to enable the maximum exploitation of your journalism by making it part of the technical solution and not an obstacle. Remember, journalism is about delivering facts to users in the most efficient, effective, and elegant manner. You will need to concentrate on the basics. Sentences must have a subject, verb and object. The best news stories explain why, where, when, what and how. They must be fact-rich and light on padding. News works best with crisp, sharp sentences. Practice writing a news story that will work on multiple platforms by having a play with the fields below. Think of the fields as one piece of paper and move from box to box to complete your story. You can preview your story as you go, or wait until the end to see what your news item looks like. When you want to leave the preview page, click return on your browser. |
||
|
35 characters
|
||
|
First paragraph This must work with the headline, but not repeat the headline. It must compliment, but not contradict. This paragraph, along with the headline you have already written, will be for an SMS news feed (the short text messages sent to mobile phones). You will be limited to 125 characters for this summary of your news story. This is because the SMS screen can take 160 characters and you will have already written 35 characters in the headline. |
125 characters |
|
|
Second paragraph This and the next paragraph complete the TV text news service when added to the headline and summary you have already written. This box is limited to 200 characters for presentation purposes and to break the story up on the screen. When you have written it you will have approximately 360 characters. The maximum number of characters on a TV text page is 800 characters, but we need at least two paragraph breaks in the page and a space above and below your content, so you have about 600 characters to play with in total. |
200 characters |
|
|
Third paragraph This is the final paragraph for the TV text feed. It is limited to 240 characters to bring the total to 600 characters. This is an ideal length for the TV text service. It also works well one WAP pages, without forcing the user to call up another page. |
240 characters |
|
|
Fourth paragraph Continue writing your story for radio news scripts, rolling TV news scripts, and the shorter Web service. Of course, once produced, the text for radio and TV will need to be altered to make sense on those particular platforms, but they should be the only outlets where further human intervention is required. This box has no limits, but it would be good practice to keep it less than 300 characters long so that it looks neat on a Web page. |
Unlimited characters |
|
|
Remainder of story Continue writing your story for Web. Again, this has no limitations, but try to break up the rest of your story with carriage returns in order to insert paragraph breaks. |
Unlimited characters |
|
|
e-mail Media Ideas
Office: + 44 (0)1707-662910 Mobile: + 44 (0)790-868-4048 © Media Ideas 2002 - 2006 |
||