HOMEWORK FOR BSI BROADCASTING CLASS

Read Carefully The Text, Then Translate It, and Write An Essay (5 Paragraph)

TELEVISION

You may think that television production is a relatively simple task. After all, you do pretty well with your camcorder. When watching a newscast from the control room at a local television station, however, you realize that television production involves much more than just operating a camcorder. Even a seemingly simple production—such as a news anchor first introducing and then playing a videotape of the school principal showing to parents and reporters the computer lab—involves a great number of intricate operations by news production personnel and the use of many sophisticated machines.

A 55-second chitchat between a TV news anchor in Portland and a tennis star in London presents a formidable challenge even for highly experienced production personnel. When watching television, viewers are largely unaware of such production complexities. But as you can see, professional television production—regardless of whether it is done in a television station or in the field—is a complex creative process in which people and machines interact to bring a variety of messages and experiences to a large audience. Even when involved in a relatively small production, you need to know what machines and people are necessary to achieve a certain type of television communication and how to coordinate the many creative and technical elements.

RADIO
Who are you talking to? The listener comes first. Decide who it is you are talking to. Is this for a specialist audience – like children, doctors or farmers – or is it for the general, unspecified listener? In passing, it could be argued that there is no such thing as the ‘general listener’ since, for consumer research purposes, we are all categorized by one or more of a number of criteria, e.g. socio-economic group, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, demographic location, social habits and so on. Even so, the style for the ‘Morning Drivetime’ will be tighter and punchier than the more relaxed ‘Afternoon Show’. The language will be different but will nevertheless be appropriate
when you know and visualize who you are writing for – the one person, the individual who is listening to you. Are they busily dashing about? Getting a meal, or lying in bed? Forget the mass audience, as if talking in a hall full of people. Radio is not a PA system – ‘some of you may have seen …’. Write directly for the person you want to talk to, seeing them as you write. It’s then more likely to come out right – ‘you may have seen …’. Avoid talking about your listener, not ‘listeners who want to contact us
should …’, but to the listener, ‘if you’d like to contact us …’. Only when questions of what we want to say, and to whom, are answered can we properly start on the script.

ETHICS
In 1981, Tanet Cooke, a reporter for the Wnshingotz Post, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a dramatic news story titled "Jimmy's bliorld,'+yurportedly the account of the life of an eight-year-old drug addict. rimmy was later revealed to be a fictional composite character, the prize was withdrawn, and Cooke resigned in disgrace,
The Janet Cook scanddl has become, quite literally, the textbook examgle of journalistic misconduct, Virtually every book on media ethics pub lished since 1981 offers at least a passing reference to the case. The National News Council published a special report on the Cook case,' and the Poynter Institute Eclr Media Studies held a symposium on its impact ten years after the incident. Media \Match, a conservative media newsletter, gives a monthly Janet Coake Award ""C distinguish the most outrageously distorted news story of the month.'~

NEWS ANCHOR
You Need To Know Both TV and Science The answer to the question then is: Eventually, you need both the knowledge of science and the knowledge of television reporting. If you don’t know the television side of it, you are not going to be
able to communicate the information clearly to the general public. You also need to be able to translate complicated, arcane sorts of topics into plain language, so that viewers who are not scientifically sophisticated can understand it. The trick here is to translate it ina manner that simplifies but also accurately reflects the data. You must understand the medical or scientific information completely so you don’t end up misleading the viewers because you didn’t quite comprehend it yourself. Another mistake is to use medicalese, in place of plain English. Your job is to take the information that is probably heavily scientific,filled with medical jargon, then translate it so the rest of the audience can understand it.

PRESENTER
To bring these dynamics from the stage to the real world, try this
simple exercise: Ask a colleague or friend to be your audience for a very
brief presentation. Then step up to the front of the room and start to
speak, but do so silently, moving your lips without using your voice. As
you do, slouch, put your weight on one foot, thrust your hands deep into
your pockets, and dart your eyes rapidly around the room. Next,
suddenly, while continuing to move your lips silently, stand up straight,
look directly at your colleague, address all of your energies to him or
her, and extend your hand toward that person, as if you were about to
shake hands.

MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATION
Although most consumers are unaware of the details of information theory, every day they use its principles in the form of electronic products and services that enrich their lives with information, education, and of course, entertainment. The cable and satellite TV systems that feed video signals into millions of American homes use video-encoding techniques that date back to Shannon’s original work and to that of other Bell Labs researchers, allowing maximum use of bandwidth while minimizing transmission errors.
Similarly, modern data-encoding compression techniques based on information theory allow millions of young (and not so young) people to fill their iPods and MP3 players with the equivalent of a shelf full of CDs. Photo formats such as JPEG maximize the number of pictures that can be taken with a digital camera before changing memory cards. Photographers can choose between “lossless” (completely accurate) images that take more disk space and various degrees of compression that make the images much more compact at some cost in accuracy. Other devices that depend on efficient data storage are also reshaping the world of broadcasting. Personal digital video recorders
are changing how and when people watch television programs, as is the ability to “stream” programs on demand over the Internet and play them on a wide variety of devices.