At NPR Nell Greenfieldboyce shows how the same pile of reporting can be dramatically different in presentation depending whether done by a radio reporter, or print reporter, and get pretty much the same place. In this case the radio and print reporter are one and the same. Greenfieldboyce spent years writing the news before joining NPR to read it out loud five or six years ago. Now she does both.
It is not easy to edit tape and compose a voice over and intro for broadcast, and also to write a standard news story that is not merely a lightly massaged transcript. That however is the extra labor that our multimedia world often requires. In both formats she – to the best of my recollection of previous reporting on the topic – deepens the history of the controversy over bird flu research in the news lately. That, as most readers know, concerns experiments that suggest a few genetic tweaks, well within the range of the standard tools of recombinant DNA, could transform the virus into a monstrously contagious ailment that could kill a lot of people and terrorize those it does not. Well before it became a hot topic in news, specialists were discussing it, she reports. This gives extra substance an NIH meeting underway this week to help decide whether and how to make parts of the research secret.
– Charlie Petit
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