Conventions of news reports

Nowadays, we seem to take news reports for granted. They are very informative and they try to be as concise as possible at the start when covering each story before then giving more detail to the more important story.

If the channel is a 24 hour channel i.e. BBC news or Sky News then they would tend to take advantage and would give as much detail as possible if the story is a breaking news story. To keep audiences which just switch to the television channel for only 2 minutes, you would find a still graphic of “breaking news” and a brief sentence of what happened and also moving graphics to maybe explain a little more about the story.

When we are going to film our news report, we are filming this in front of a green screen. This means we will have to look at a number of conventions of news reports. This includes:

1) How the picture of the story/news report graphics are framed & positioned, coloured and lit.

2) How many elements are on the screen together, if there are too many elements on the screen, the news report graphics will look overcrowded and not look professional. It may confuse the audience in terms of having too much news to show them and not informing them correctly.

3) If we are going to do a longer more detailed news report, a routine convention is the pan from an insignificant object to the real subject of the report e.g. you first see the sight of a flag before panning to see the reporter talking about the story.

4) Another convention is how the camera would zoom into the picture from a long-shot into a close up of the person in the story or the use of a hand-held camera to make the story feel more natural and real.

5) Editing is very important in terms of how quickly the shots are changed, what images are juxtaposed and even the montage of the edited sequence – very important when trying to get the meaning of the story across.

6) If we end up only showing pictures of the factory in the news report then the effectiveness of the voiceover within the montage is essential in getting the message across towards the audience but also make it sound natural and like a conventional narrative.