Photo: Davor Puklavec/Pixsell

As journalists, we always strive to tell the truth in an accurate manner and realize the words we choose affect the impression we leave on our readers, viewers or listeners. Being as fair and accurate as possible is particularly important when it comes to reporting on sexual abuse.

OnMedia’s Sean Sinico looks at responsible ways to report on rape and other forms of intimate partner violence and sexual abuse.

Journalists are used to dealing with a new topic every day when they go to work. Today it’s the city council, tomorrow it’s local business, and who knows what it’ll be the day after that. But when the task is reporting on sexual abuse and the people who’ve suffered it, journalists shouldn’t treat it like any other day at the office.

It’s easy to revictimize a person by making them relive terrible experiences for an interview and then see their lives presented in the media in a manner they didn’t want. Media reports also often make it sound like the crimes committed against the people who experienced abuse were the result of something the survivor or victim did – who they were or were not with, what they said or wore – and some reports can even imply that violent sexual abuse was actually an act of consensual sex or permissible for cultural or societal reasons.

These factors all make reporting on sexual abuse difficult, but they aren’t reasons to ignore a widespread and important issue – the World Health Organization estimates that 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced either intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. Under such circumstances, truthful and accurate reporting showing the devastating effects of rape and other forms of sexual abuse can promote positive social change at the local, national and even international level.

Here’s how you can make sure your work with survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual abuse doesn’t make a too-common problem even worse for the people already living with it.

The interview

Before starting your interview, be clear with the interviewees how what they say will be used, what type of media they will appear in, and ask if their identities need to be protected.

Listen closely to what interviewees say. You don’t want to make sexual assault victims repeat what happened to them unnecessarily. Also make sure you have a good list of open-ended questions that will allow your interviewees to share as much as they are comfortable with. Respect your interviewee’s decision not to answer questions.

The majority of females who have experienced sexual violence tend to be more comfortable with a female interviewer. If that is impossible, it is a good idea to have a female colleague present at the interview.

Never say you know how they feel – even if you have suffered from sexual violence yourself. It is impossible to completely understand another person’s feelings about the violence committed against them.

Extra info: The human rights organization Witness has compiled an excellent guide and set of checklists for interviewing survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. It is also available as a printable and easier-to-read PDF.

The report

Getting it wrong when writing about survivors of violent sexual abuse is easy, and it happens too often. No matter what a person’s previous choices in life, no one deserves to be abused and nothing serves as justification for sexual abuse.

As you write, make sure to keep the following points in in mind:

Rape, intimate partner violence and sexual abuse are always crimes. In your writing, be sure to make it clear who was responsible for the criminal behavior by avoiding the passive voice, which put the focus on the victim. Clearly describe what happened. Instead of “she was abused,” you can write: “an unknown man raped her.”

You’ll need to decide how much detail of your interviewee’s experience to include in your report. It’s up to you to find the balance between providing too detailed a picture and not making the gravity of your interviewee’s experiences clear to readers.

If, during your writing, you find words like “alleged,” “admits,” “confesses,” “was raped,” “was abused,” “unharmed” or “had sex,” then you should double-check to make sure your report is clear about who the victim and who the perpetrator of the crime are. The US-based Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women has a PDF toolkit addressing exactly these phrases and what makes them inaccurate. New England Law also maintains a lengthy list of problematic language used in court documents and serves as an excellent resource of terms you should not use in your writing and suggests better alternatives that focus on the victim’s experience.

Provide context for the crime you’re reporting. Definitions of rape and sexual abuse vary around the world and reliable statistics are often hard to find because victims often do not officially press charges against perpetrators. To get a wider view of the issues, talk to health experts and NGOs to find out how widespread sexual assault is where you are, how people react to it, and how survivors cope. Painting the individual case you’re working as part of a broader social issue can help create greater awareness for sexual assault and also serve to support public health and preventative measures.

If you promised anonymity to your interviewees, make sure that there are no details in your report that allow anyone to identify them.

Consider including steps other victims of intimate personal violence or sexual abuse can take to find help coping with the crimes committed against them. Links to local NGOs and other resources offering support to survivors can help people find assistance they might not have known about.

Consider letting your interviewee read your report before it’s published or broadcast. This will help the interviewee know what to expect when the report is made public and can bring any inaccuracies to light.

More information

This is the place where I’d generally give you links to excellent reporting on sexual abuse. Such examples, however, are difficult to find. In a 2013 interview, Claudia Garcia-Rojas, an editor of the Chicago Taskforce media toolkit linked to above, said she looked at hundreds of articles about rape and sexual assault for positive example and found two, which “weren’t even about rape, they were stories about covering rape.”

My own searches were equally unsatisfying, so instead of positive examples, I’ll ask you to read through the links above – even if you don’t think rape or sexual violence is a topic you’ll have to cover. The tragic spread of sexual violence means at some point in your career – whether you expect it or not – you’re certain to come in contact with a victim of sexual violence, and you owe it to that person to have an idea of how to handle the situation.

If, in addition to the links above, if you’d like more in-depth information on reporting on sexual abuse, check out the Poynter News University course Reporting on Sexual Violence and its 2009 webinar Covering Sexual Assault. The Scottish charity Zero Tolerance has created a PDF document covering in more detail many of the topics addressed in this post.

** For information on where victims of intimate partner violence or sexual abuse can turn to, the HotPeachPages website maintains an international list of abuse and crisis hotlines. 

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Author: Sean Sinico, edited by Kyle James

Image credits: flickr/Lucy Maude Ellis CC:BY-ND; WHO; flickr/Women’s eNews CC:BY, flickr/West Midlands Police CC:BY

In some countries and cultures, it’s very hard to find or create quiet places to record interviews. The vibrant street life may be so noisy that it’s audible from inside buildings, or the extreme climate may cause sounds such as pelting rain or creaking roofs expanding in the sun.

Outside, everything from barking dogs to street hawkers and blaring music can mean it’s impossible to find a quiet corner. As a journalist, you’ll need to work around this – after all, it’s not possible to ask hundreds of motorists to stop tooting!

OnMedia’s Lesley Branagan has tips to help you get good clean audio that will edit up nicely, no matter what the situation.

Indoor environments

• When you first make contact with your interviewee, ask them if it’s possible to do the interview in a room of the building that doesn’t face the street.
• If all the rooms get a lot of street noise, seat your interviewee away from the window, and seat yourself so that you have your back to the window. That way your microphone won’t be pointed at the source of all the noise.
• Close any windows and curtains in the room to deaden any sound.
• Use a directional microphone (shotgun or cardioid) or set your usual microphone onto a directional setting, so that you don’t pick up background sound from all directions.
• Ask for the airconditioner or fan to be turned off because it just sounds terrible. If it’s exceptionally hot and the interviewee is still reluctant, I often suggest breaking the interview into two sections, and turn on the AC/fans for a few minutes in the middle to cool down. Most interviewees will agree to this compromise, especially if you frame the uncomfortable heat as something that you will ‘endure together’ to get a good outcome.
• In many countries, doing an interview in someone’s home means the kitchen is very close by and is often in use. Request that no one uses the kitchen during the interview, as you don’t want the sounds of clattering saucepans as an accompaniment to your interview.
• Having a journalist visit can often attract lots of visitors but these can make editing your audio a problem. Don’t be afraid to close windows and front doors. If a colleague or family member insists on sitting in on the interview, advise them: “I will need you to be very quiet during the interview and not to move at all.”
• Make sure you record plenty of background atmosphere, which matches the atmosphere of the room during the interview. For example, if there were lots of cars tooting at a distance outside, try to record the same sounds, but without your interviewee speaking this time.

Outside

If you are recording an interview outdoors, for example, with a shopkeeper in a noisy bazaar or a protester at an election rally, there is no way you can avoid noise. On the plus side, a market or village square’s dense sound atmosphere contributes to the character of your documentary and transports the listener to this vibrant scene. But if it’s too loud, your interviewee just won’t be heard which defeats the point of making the recording.

• Try to find a place where the background noise is at a consistent level behind your interviewee. If there are no jumps in the background levels, it is easier for the listener to tune their ears to focus on the speaker.
• Position yourself with your back towards the source of the noise – that way your microphone is facing away from the noise.
• Moving to the back of a market stall or around a corner can sometimes make a world of difference in dampening the sound.
• Try to do your interview away from groups of people talking or shouting, and away from noises with sudden increases and decreases, such as generators or children.
• If sudden noises happen during your interview and drown out your interviewee’s voice, then that portion of your recording won’t be usable. You will need to request the interviewee to go back and repeat the last sentence. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’ll have to get you to repeat that. You were saying?”
• Make sure you record some good atmos of the background sound by itself, and you can use this to patch over any edits and make the background sound appear seamless. Unexpected sounds like sudden shouts may add a lot of character to your piece, but try to record those separately so you can have more control when you are editing.
• Be aware of whether the natural atmos changed over the duration of the interview. For example, did the bazaar go from being very bustling to very quiet when people started their prayers? If so, you need to try to record both types of sounds. Did the background generator sound stop during the interview? If this is the case, you’ll need to record the same generator sound later, and then place it underneath the second part of the interview when you are editing, making sure you keep the levels consistent or fading out the background sound slowly.

For more about recording audio, take a look these onMedia posts:

Top 5 mistakes recording audio

Digital audio recorders for journalists: what to look for

Six tips for selecting powerful voice clips

Written by Lesley Branagan, edited by Kate Hairsine

(photo: flickr/Alan Levin CC:BY-SA)

For a lot of journalists, dealing with numbers and math can be a little scary. There’s a reason many reporters will say they went into journalism instead of finance or engineering. It’s a love of words and language.

But journalists need to have a grasp of the basics since working reporters deal with math pretty much every day. Numbers make up the foundation of many stories – the municipal project is over of under budget, the politician is some percentage up or down in the polls, violence rates this year are over or below the ten-year average. So there’s really no choice but to get your head around some fundamental math concepts.

onMedia’s Kyle James, for whom math can be a struggle, offers this quick summary of a few calculations you need to know to do your job well and where you can go online to get help when all those numbers just start swimming in your head.

I fell out of love with math early on. It started in elementary school when I had a lot of trouble memorizing the multiplication tables. Then it was kind of downhill from there. The killing blow to the troubled relationship came in high school calculus. Oh, the dread I felt walking in that classroom door every day.

While journalists generally don’t need to know all that much about logarithms and differential equations, we do need to know the most obvious, such as knowing how to add and subtract, multiply and divide. But it’s also important to  be able to calculate percentages, find an average, and do a few other things.

Let’s go through some of them here. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it simple enough so even I can understand it.

Percentages

(photo: flickr/Leo Reynolds CC:BY-NC-SA)

Percentages, representing a part of a whole, make frequent appearances in news stories. They describe relationships between numbers that might be hard to grasp if just the raw data is presented. For example, it’ll be easier for people to understand the results of an election if we report that Sally Smith won almost 56 percent of the vote instead of just writing that she won 14,337 votes out of the 25,689 cast.

Problem: What is 13 percent of 50?

Step 1:

The basic formula is: the percent multiplied by the ‘of’ number  = ??

13 percent x 50 = ??

Step 2:

Change the “percent” number into a decimal. To do that, divide the number by 100.

13 / 100 = .13

Step 3:

Do the math laid out in Step 1.

.13 x 50 = 6.5

Answer: 13 percent of 50 is 6.5. Easy, right?

Let’s change it up a little. How can we work out the percentage?

Problem: What percentage of the total vote did Sally Smith get in the election?

Step 1

Calculate the total (the sum) for the category of numbers of your choice (in this case, the total number of votes cast). That’s 25,689.

Step 2

Divide the value of a particular case (votes received by Sally Smith: 14,337) by the total value.

14,337 /25,689 = .558

Step 3

Multiply the result by 100 (or move the decimal point two places to the right) to convert from decimal to percent.

Answer: 55.8 percent.

Not so bad, huh?

Percent Change

Percent change is also often used in news stories, since it helps illustrate how a set of numbers – such as time or prices – has changed over time.

Problem: The price of a yearly bus ticket went up from $110 last year to $125 this year. What percent did the price increase?

Step 1:

The basic formula is (new value – old value) / old value = percent change

(125 – 110) / 110 = ??

Step 2:

Do the math

15 / 110 = .136

Step 3:

Multiply the answer by 100 or move the decimal two places to the right to get the percentage.

Answer: The price went up 13.6 percent.

Averages

Averages present a picture of a group of numbers, giving us a central value or a “central tendency”. When people talk about averages, they’re often lumping a few different things together. Let’s go through the two used mostly in journalism—the mean and the median.

Mean

The mean is the average people are most familiar with. It’s easy to compute. Just add all the numbers up in a group and divide by the number of values in that group.

(photo: flickr/Eric Allix Rogers CC:BY-NC-SA)

Problem: What is the average price of a house on Main Street? The five houses on the street cost $125,000, $110,000, $95,000, $105,000 and $120,000?

Step 1: Add the values together.

125,000, 110,000, 95,000, 105,000 and 120,000 = 555,000

Step 2: Divide by the number of values.

555,000 / 5 = 111,000

Answer: The average price of a house on Main Street is $111,000.

Median

But sometimes the mean can be misleading. What if there were one very expensive house on Main Street with a price tag of one million dollars? That “outlier” figure would push the mean much higher, and we wouldn’t have a good representation the general price of most of the houses there.

So in these kinds of instances, you might well want to find or calculate the middle of a collection of numbers containing an extremely high or low value. That’s the median, the middle value in a group of numbers. As an example, let’s use our house prices again.

Problem: What is the median price of a house on Main Street?

Step 1:

Rewrite you list from low-to-high or high-to-low (with the million-dollar house)

$95,000, $105,000, $110,000, $120,000, $125,000, $1,000,000

Step 2:

Take the middle number in the list. That’s your median.

But wait! We’ve got an even number of houses in our list. In this case, we would take the average of the middle two.

Answer: The median here is $115,000.

While these are a few of the most common math tools journalists should be comfortable with, there are more. The Poynter Institute journalism training school lists a few others, such as a familiarity with statistics, ability to calculate percentages, ratios, rates of change, and other relationships between numbers, an understanding of “margin of error” in polling and an ability to translate numbers into terms that your audience can understand.

Oh, but you should! (photo: flickr/Sean MacEntee CC:BY)

Some good resources

If you’re stuck, or just want to double-check your work, go to some of the links below to get help or even a refresher course in some basic math concepts.

Statistics Every Writer Should Know. Author Robert Niles has put together a handy that puts basic statistics concepts in plain language.

Math for Journalists: Help with Numbers. Poyner has a free refresher course to get up to speed. Very helpful.

Percent Change Calculator. If you want to double-check your percent change calculation, do it here.

Newsroom Math. Here’s a handy slide show with the basics laid out.

Newsroom math cheat sheet. It’s not all that pretty, but this one page sheet lays out the most common calculations reporters need.

Mathematics Competency Test for Journalists. If you’re feeling confident in your math know-how, here’s a place to test yourself.

Happy calculating.

Written by Kyle James, edited by Kate Hairsine

(photo: Kyle James)

An online multimedia story is a combination of video, text, photos, audio, graphics and interactive elements where each aspect complements the others. It allows a reporter to draw on the strength of each medium to tell a more compelling story.

But making a multimedia story really shine requires forethought and planning. Even before going out to report, journalists need to think about how they’re going to approach the story, when they’re going to use video, text, sound or photos, and then tie everything together to create a cohesive package. onMedia’s Kyle James has tips on doing the prep work to make sure your multimedia story is a success.

Playing to their strengths

Really good multimedia storytelling is more than just posting a video or a graph alongside a text story on a website. It’s about taking advantage of the characteristics of each medium to present the different aspects of your story in the most engaging way.

I find it’s best to sit down at the very beginning and divide the contents of the story among the different media. I ask myself: “Would this aspect work best as a short video, or should I take pictures or maybe write a couple of paragraphs?”

When I’m breaking things down, here’s what I keep in mind:

Video: Best for action and movement, shows what is happening (a protest, a fire, a person cooking, a dance performance). Can capture emotion well and good for strong quotes (eyewitness to a significant event, person recalling a tragedy). Video really draws people in.

Pictures: Good for capturing a specific, important moment, especially if it’s emotional (a reunion of long-lost siblings, soldier returning from war). Photos are good for showing places, environments and things that don’t move (buildings, landscapes). People can study pictures, unlike with video. That old cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” still rings true in many instances.

Audio: Conveys emotions, feelings. The voices of experts can give your story credibility. Background (ambient) sound, especially if combined with pictures, can give a good sense of place. Audio works best when combined with pictures or video.

Graphics: These work well providing complex information in easy-to-understand ways. Stories with lots of numbers and statistics can benefit from graphs, showing trends or relationships (clothing exports over the last decade, wage growth). Diagrams can show how things work or how something came about (where floodwaters reached, how the bridge collapsed). Maps show where the story unfolded and can be layered with interactive elements.

Text: The written word works well for abstract, complicated aspects of a story. It’s the place to provide background and analysis, as well as headlines and photo captions. Many multimedia producers save text for the information that can’t be conveyed with video, audio, pictures or graphics.

If we’ve got video of an event, why would we simply describe it with text? Video’s power is showing action, so we should use it. Pictures of people overtaken by powerful emotions or recordings of their voices talking about their experiences are going to be very compelling. Yet an opinion piece on a policy or development or an analysis what has been learned in the wake of an accident might best be suited for text.

Writing it down

Since I can’t keep all this in my head, I need to write things down.

Click here for a planning list that helps you organize your thoughts around a story and how you want to cover it. It asks for things like a working title, a short story synopsis, conflict/tension involved, the main characters, who you’ll interview, and what works best with video/audio/pictures/etc.

Those who are more visually minded might want to write up a chart instead. The picture below is a quick sketch of possible elements of a multimedia story that I’ll call “The Bridge.” While this isn’t a real multimedia project, the story is true. In 2010, a stampede on a bridge in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh during a big festival killed 350 people and injured 750 others.

In this instance, I’ve made headers of the main media elements and put in aspects of the story that could fall under each. The arrows between some of them point out aspects of the story could have several elements. For example, the hourly timeline would be an interactive graphic that would incorporate text and pictures.

Assembling a storyboard

Now that you’ve got the elements figured out, you will want to create a rough storyboard of your project. A storyboard is a sketch of how the story will be organized and laid out on the screen. It’s a good idea to do a sketch of the opening page of your multimedia story, the first thing users will see, and then subpages or sections as well.

I’ve quickly drawn up mock-ups for the landing page and one inside page.

On the landing page, the first screen people will see on coming to my story, I’ve sketched out (very roughly) the title and the kind of picture I think I’d like.

I’ve put a space for some text to give us the very basics of what happened (remember, text is good for background and context), and then a possible navigation menu with four categories.

I could add a video or more pictures. But right now, I don’t think I want much more on my opening page, so I’m going to keep it simple.

This second page is where users land if they click on the first link in the navigation column, and we go to the background page. I’m using text because it’s good for context, video because we might find some footage of the actual stampede, a map to show users where things happened, a timeline to take us though the day of the tragedy, and eyewitness accounts from people who were there that combine pictures and audio

A storyboard is not only a good organizing tool, it can help point out things you might have missed. It can also help show you if you’ve actually got the resources and time to do all the things you want to do.

Storyboards aren’t written in stone, they’re just guides. You might well start changing things around, or adding and dropping elements, after you begin doing your reporting and seeing what great material you get or what’s not going to come through after all.

Things to keep in mind

• Multimedia stories are multi-dimensional, they use different media elements that complement each other
• They require planning and forethought
• Start thinking in a non-linear way. Instead of “first part” and “second part,” think “this part” and “that part”
• After preliminary research, start thinking about the different media to use – draw on the strengths of each
• Come up with a rough storyboard – you can always change it as you go along

For more onMedia posts on multimedia, see

Visual storytelling and moving beyond ‘multimedia’

A look at what the New York Times is doing with multimedia

The test of the multimedia storytelling app, Stellar

Written by Kyle James, edited by Kate Hairsine

(photo: flickr/Quinn Dombrowski CC:BY-SA)

Almost every news or feature story – whether it’s for print, broadcast or online – benefits from having good quotes, voice clips or sound bites.

Quotes directly express the views of the people you talked to, lend credibility to your story, and liven up your writing. Quotes are like a spice that adds flavor and zest to your story. Without them, while your piece might well have a lot of informative facts, it can be pretty bland.

But figuring out exactly which bits to pull from your interviews and put in your story can be challenging even if you are an experienced reporter.

onMedia’s Kyle James has trained radio, print and online journalists in countries around the world for years. In this post, he offers a few guidelines on keeping an eye out for what’s quotable and what’s not.

What should a quote do?

Quotes add the human dimension to the news, even in hard news stories. They give authenticity to a story, telling readers (or listeners or viewers) how people involved in the story think or feel – in their own words. Quotes can make issues more concrete and understandable, and put flesh and blood on abstract ideas.

(In the interest of brevity, I’m mostly going to use the word “quotes” in this post. But it will also refer to voice clips, sound bites or whatever term your particular medium uses for relating direct speech.)

A quote from a single mother hit by a reduction in social welfare benefits can show have a tax cut might affect the poor. A quote from a small-business owner on difficulties she’s having in the face of stricter government regulations can illustrate the impact of new legislation.

(photo: flickr/Eelco CC:BY-NC)

Quoting people also lowers the risk that you, the journalist, might misrepresent what someone says. If you broadcast their exact words, you’re more likely to stay out of trouble if that person isn’t happy with what you reported.

Good quotes should make your listener sit up and take notice, and should be more likely to stick with people after the story. (This is especially true in broadcasting, where we hear someone’s actual voice, and maybe even see their expression as they’re speaking).

Maybe the single mother’s voice choked when she talked about having a hard time buying groceries. Maybe the business owner’s eyes flashed with anger at the thought of the money she’d have to spend satisfying new regulations.

Now, a couple of terms:

Direct quotes – these are exact transcriptions of what a person said. In print stories, these go in quotation marks.

“Their ultimate sacrifice is yet another example that freedom is not free. In fact, sometimes it comes at a great cost,” said US General Roger Brady, speaking at the ceremony honoring fallen soldiers.

Indirect quotes/paraphrasing – these reflect the meaning what a person said, but the wording is not exactly the same. No quotation marks are needed.

Speaking at the ceremony honoring fallen soldiers, US General Roger Brady said the servicemen’s sacrifice was an example of the high cost of freedom.

What makes a quote good?

Interviews you do are going to contain some information which is quotable and probably a lot which isn’t. So how do you decide? Below is a list of what makes a sentence or two a good quote candidate.

–It contains an opinion

Traditional news style says neutral reporters are not supposed to let opinions into their newswriting unless they’re attributed to someone or represented in a quote. It’s even better if that opinion is expressed in a strong or memorable way.

“I am so fed up and angry with this government,” said Heng Chunly, a nurse who had joined the protest. “I came here to see justice done since I am sick of all the injustice in Cambodia.”

–It expresses feeling or emotion

A memorable quote can communicate the emotions felt by a person involved in the story. In the best cases, it also reflects the speaker’s personality.

I pulled the two clips below out of an interview with Eleanor Howard, an American woman whose husband Bill died during the Berlin Airlift in the late 1940s. The clips reflect the emotion she still feels, more than 60 years later, when she thinks about her late husband. Plus, her southern American accent is simply delicious.

Eleanor Howard:

“[Bill was] such a fine Christian man, and so good lookin’!”

“And I saw the base chaplain. And I literally turned to stone. I knew something had happened. And so I opened the door to a sea of sad faces and they told me Bill was gone.”

–It’s an eyewitness account

Our readers/listeners get a front-row seat, in a sense, at events we weren’t at. For example, in the Berlin Airlift story, I also interviewed a woman who lived in Berlin during that time.

“Our enemies who had once dropped bombs on us were now bringing us food, and coal to heat our homes with,” said Erika Demitrowitz, who was 24 when the airlift began. “I can remember the day the airlift was over, we picked all the flowers we could and took them to the Americans. That was our ‘thank you’.”

She takes us back to a time long ago and marvels at the sudden switch in circumstances as the once-hated enemy becomes a savior of sorts. It’s good stuff.

What makes a weak quote?

–Background or factual information

While this kind of information is crucial for any news story, it’s not the best material for quotes.

If there are lots of numbers and statistics, it’s probably best to paraphrase (photo: flickr/MervynChua CC:BY-NC)

Why should we quote an analyst telling us that job growth last quarter was one percent, and is expected to increase by 0.3 percent next quarter and then fall slightly after that? It might be solid information, but it’s a pretty boring print quote and absolutely deadly for broadcast.

Paraphrase the analyst instead. Put his or her comments in your own words. You can probably write them more succinctly and save valuable print space or broadcast seconds for the more meaty quotes.

–Unclear or confusing speech

While professional speakers might know how to consistently express themselves in crystal clear quotes and sound bites, the rest of us mangle things occasionally. If someone expresses something in a manner that’s unclear, we need to use an indirect quote or paraphrase it.

–Jargon/specialized language

Many fields, even journalism, have their own specialized language that is mostly unknown to outsiders. That means when you hear someone speaking in jargon, you need to politely ask them to use terms familiar to the general populace.

I did a lot of business reporting for radio at one time and would come up against this problem frequently. Economists tend to speak their own rarified language, which can be pretty incomprehensible to non-specialists. I would often have to ask them to rephrase something in a simpler way. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t, I’d rewrite the information in easier-to-understand terms, attributing it, of course.

How many quotes should I use?

Remember that quotes are the spice that livens up the story. They give it color and authenticity while adding the human element. But just like in the kitchen, too much spice can make a dish inedible. So use quotes, don’t abuse them. Don’t string a bunch together just because you have them in your notebook.

This is even more important with radio or TV, where you usually only have a short period of time to tell your story. You need to be especially careful to only use the most powerful clips/sound bites that meet the criteria laid out above.

Can I ever change quotes?

Good journalists are very careful with quotes. The cardinal rule is simple: you should never change the meaning of something someone said.

Now, let’s say you’re recording an interview and someone starts off a sentence you want to use, then goes on a long tangent before looping around to finish off the thought about a minute later. In that case, I would say it’s OK to cut out the superfluous information in the middle, or delete all the “you knows” and “likes” scattered about, to end up with a concise, strong quote/clip. The crucial thing is that the quote reflects what the interviewee meant to express.

In print this is easy — maybe too easy. With digital editing systems, it’s not all that harder, in many cases. But be careful, if you accidentally change the meaning of something someone said, it can easily turn out to be a body blow to your own credibility and will only hurt you in the long run.

To print out a one-page summary on good and not-so-good quotes, click here.

Written by Kyle James, edited by Kate Hairsine