Author
Tina Šoln
In one of our blogs, we talked about how to prepare for a radio interview. In this blog we are going to deal with radio news. Below you can read some simple tricks to facilitate the work of radio journalists and to ensure that our company get more media coverage.
When preparing a press release, we often add various statements in the form of direct quotes. So why not also record the key statements and include them when sending the press release to the media? You don't need expensive equipment for recording; your smartphone will provide good enough quality.
Statements for radio should be short (recommended length up to 30 seconds), and the language used should be simple. Keep your sentences short and to the point, avoid complex sentence structures, and make sure to capture the essence of the message in a few sentences.
If the press release follows a press conference, you can record the entire press conference, just like the attending journalists, then extract the key highlights, cut them from the full recording, and add them to the press release. For basic editing of recordings, you can use the free Audacity program online.
You don't need expensive equipment for recording; your smartphone will provide good enough quality.
Radio news, as well as the texts spoken by radio hosts and announcers during breaks between playing music, must be short and to the point, conveying the essence in a few sentences. Therefore, we can add a shorter version in the form of a news brief to the press release, answering the key questions in the 5W + H model: who, what, where, when, why, and how; in five lines. This way, we convey the essence, and in the shorter version of the news, we can include information that we deem most important and that a journalist might omit when shortening the entire press release.
If you want to add audio statements to the shorter version of the press release, it's best for you to already include the statement and clearly mark it in the text. Again, adhere to the principle of brevity: even with the included statement, the entire news (text + statement recording) should not exceed 1 minute.
We can add a shorter version in the form of a news brief to the press release, answering the key questions in the 5W + H model: who, what, where, when, why, and how; in five lines.
To summarize: when communicating news via radio waves, brevity, succinctness, and simplicity are key. Use short and simple sentences, if adding audio recordings to press releases, keep them no longer than 30 seconds, and for the shorter version of press releases tailored for radio, stick to the 5W + H model.
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