I teach Audio News Gathering for Ole Miss’ School of Journalism and New Media on Tuesday nights. Our textbook is “Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production” by Jerome Kern.
Chapter One points out that radio has proven to be quite a survivor as a news medium. Kern goes on to say that television could have put radio out of business in the 1950s and ’60s, but it didn’t, and the proliferation of cable news channels could’ve made radio news irrelevant, but that didn’t happen either.
The course teaches how to produce stories for radio or podcast. Overarching the radio news concept is the art of telling a story. My definition of feature story is a personalized topical report about a local person and her or his situation, or, a local event or aspect, in soft analysis form, that will be interesting to the listening audience.
It’s a feature in the sense that it’s topical and not news, yet it’s interesting to the public and something that the public should know about. With a feature, the radio station’s news department is going beyond the duty of reporting the news by featuring a 2-minute piece about an interesting topic that most everyone in the audience would be able to relate to.
My definition of a hard news story: a report about an event of a serious nature. Examples are crime, fatalities, politics.
1. Which two qualify for features?
A. Ole Miss student has passion and giftedness for chess
B. The race between Espy and Hyde-Smith
C. Series of burglaries
D. Traffic fatality
E. Couple in Oktibbeha County enjoy deer watching
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2. NPR stands for:
.A. Nisus Public Relations
.B. National Programming for Radio
.C. National Public Radio
.D. Nuances of Perfect Radio
No. 1 is A and E. No. 2 is C.
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3. nisus (NIGH-sus)
A. a mental or physical effort to attain an end
B. a perfective urge or endeavor
C. an effort or striving toward a particular goal
D. an impulse toward realizing a goal
As for No. 3, nisus, all four apply. I’m going to use the noun “nisus” in class and ask my students to have the nisus (plural) to produce the best radio news stories possible. I find it interesting that the spelling and pronunciation are the same for the singular and plural form of nisus.
Editor’s Note: Dr. Don Rodney Vaughan is the pastor of Mt. Vernon Baptist Church near Eupora and is on the faculty of East Mississippi Community College, Golden Triangle Campus. Contact him at dvaughan@eastms.edu.
