Week 10 notes
Week 10 focused on writing “kicker” stories. A “kicker” is a story about something funny or odd that is often placed at the end of a broadcast.
A kicker story can be a package, if there’s enough of a story to tell and enough video to support a package, or it can be a shorter anchor script.
There are several challenges in writing kickers. Among them, being funny or clever in your writing, without being disrespectful to your subject or viewers. We must also remember that standard journalistic values still apply to kickers and features. We must use proper attribution and fact checking and we must not insert our own opinions into the stories.
We watched a few kicker-style stories by CNN’s Jeanne Moos and Andrew Brown. You can see some of Moos’s packages at this link, and elsewhere on the CNN website. http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/22/gotta-watch-the-top-jeanne-moos-videos-of-2011/