Are You Made for TV?

A few years ago, I was part of an investigative team looking into inconsistencies in property values in Clark County, Ohio.

What that means in English is that some homes in the area were way overvalued -- leading to huge increases in property taxes -- and some homes were not valued as high as they should have been.

The culprit, according to one whistleblower, was shoddy reappraisal work done by a company hired by a shoddy county auditor. For this reporter, it was investigative heaven. And it was work that yours truly and a colleague of mine won an award for Community Reporting from the Ohio Associated Press.

But, oddly enough, this huge story that was in our newspaper constantly over more than six months made barely a blip in broadcast news.

Was it it because it wasn't important? Not at all. It was because, as broadcast is largely driven by audio and visual, this story was hard to show and explain.

Each time I wrote a follow-up to that story, I had to carefully craft it so that people could follow along and not get blogged down by numbers, factors and something one source called " economic obsolescence."

It was tough to do -- and would have been even tougher if I only had 1 minute and 15 seconds of broadcast time -- at the most -- to explain, including any interviews.

You need to ask yourself: is your story made for TV? Can you:

• Readily explain it in two or three sentences?
• Provide several interesting visuals to explain it?
• Offer simple statistics to prove your point?

The moral of the story? These are key points you need to address with any story, but especially with broadcast media. They rely on sight and sound to get your story told, so if your story consists of mostly paper, perhaps a newspaper would be a better fit.

Bridgette Outten is a journalist and media relations consultant with The Write Vision Group, Inc. With a background in print media, she has written thousands of articles for newspapers and online publications. At The Write Vision Group, Bridgette consults with nonprofits and small businesses about how to get their programs and efforts in the news. Meanwhile, she blogs on all things journalism.