- Editorial: Talking newspapers vary as much as their print brothers. Some serve mixed urban and rural areas with several large towns, others serve a limited community and probably take most of their material from one or two weekly newspapers. The basic problem is the same – get a clear picture of your audience and work to please them, even if their interests are not the same as yours.
- Earn loyalty: Imagine that your listeners pay for their TN and that you have to fight for their interest and loyalty. Listeners do not have to listen to the TN. Many have good local radio stations, although to get news on a regular basis usually means listening all day, whereas a TN can be listened to at any time. So, even if listeners are loyal and ‘ever so grateful’, your job is to give them the best TN possible in journalistic and production terms This means a clear structure to the TN so that listeners know what is coming when and give them adequate warning when you decide to do a rejig.
- Balance:”It means balancing your selection of news so that you give coverage to the different communities in your area and reflecting the full range of local news – rapes, royal visits, golden wed- dings, court cases, planning matters, in fact, the lot. If your area is covered by only one weekly newspaper (and a number of free papers, which should be ignored if their news is out of date) then your TN has no real choice as to content. If one week is all break-ins, car crashes and muggings, then that IS the news, whereas the following week may contain a number of golden weddings, reports of local school children collecting funds for a good cause and the opening of a new leisure centre.
- Full awareness: It means doing a re-write when a story has been running all week or big, late story breaks, possibly after your main news source has already been printed. You really cannot pretend that a double murder has not happened just because it missed the current edition of the local paper, and although there would be coverage on the TN the following week, a call to the paper’s news desk will produce information, even if it goes under ‘stop press’.
‘Awareness’ can be extended to TN editors knowing when information in a story is incorrect, e.g. the wrong telephone number being given for the local branch of the Samaritans.
