It introduces characters and sets up a conflict or a challenge. The beginning tells us what's at stake in the story and gives us reasons to care about what happens. We use elements of good narrative to pull these pieces together, starting from the simple fact that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. If the nervous woman in a Sarajevo church suddenly tells you to shut up because a stranger has walked in, then she grabs your mic and causes some nasty hand noise-it's a telling moment. Leave in the ragged, unplanned moments that add to the intimacy. Leave some questions in your clips, so we hear you learning and thinking out loud. For God's sake, tell us something we don't know. If a subject tells you how best to anaesthetize a pygmy elephant, it's probably worth a mention. If the subject is audibly spitting tobacco juice during the interview, don't stop him. Sticking with stuff you actually see shouldn't be restrictive. For example, physical descriptions: hands, faces gestures, habits, tics. More often they work into your narrative, alongside the other things we like. And the 11-year-old guerilla doesn't like the AK because it pulls high and to the right.
#Dispatch definition driver
That's how you find out that your Congolese driver hasn't had three meals a day in 30 years. Ask subjects about the things that define them. How can you do that?įlesh out your characters. We're telling people about the state of the world by taking them to the rarest of places, inside a stranger's life. And we don't put reporters or characters into scenes they really aren't in. We don't use generic sound effects or music beds under the clips (unless the music is from a scene, or part of the story). We don't broadcast "script & clip" items (where the reporter reads a script in a studio and plays clips).Įxcept for host interviews and on-scene conversations, our contributors talk directly to the audience. That means, in a dispatch the sound doesn't stop. The best ones shine a light into the lives of people.Ī radio dispatch gets its veracity from the authentic sound of the reporter being in the scene-even interacting with others in the scene.
The most memorable dispatches contain a strong "Who knew?" factor. Good dispatches include vivid images, tension, change, conflict, contradiction, or irony.
#Dispatch definition how to
But they're the kind of stories most professionals are capable of doing, and they serve as good examples of how to get more out of a piece by using a few simple strategies.Ī dispatch is a report from a specific place - by a narrator telling us things only someone who is there could tell. They don't correspond one-to-one with the points we make, and they aren't all spectacular. We've included some pieces to listen to at the end of this post. We wanted a document that aimed for high standards, yet offered help for people risking their lives in places they're just learning to spell the names of-to grind out $100-a-minute pieces for overworked editors with short deadlines and dwindling budgets. We also wanted to share with our contributors some of the thoughts about craft we've had over the years. So we're mostly at the mercy of where other people choose to be and for how long.Īfter 10 seasons, we're getting more pitches than we have time or money for, so we wanted to formalize some of the standards we use to decide what to do and how to do it. Many are from CBC reporters on the trail of breaking news for our newscasts. The Nieman Foundation For Narrative Journalism, at Harvard, published a nicely edited version of it in three parts, on its website, and it's also reproduced here:ĭispatches is a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio News weekly show of documentaries, essays, interviews and reports from around the world. We have a journalistic field guide, What Is A Dispatch, that we sent to serious story-pitchers.
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