Book Review

ALYSEN, Barbara (2000)
The Electronic Reporter: Broadcast Journalism in Australia, Deakin University Press, Geelong, Victoria, 243 pp. ISBN 0 949823 848

Reviewed by Sandra Haswell
University of Qeensland

We’re rolling! From the minute you pick up the book, scan the Contents list and flick through the pages – whether teacher, student or practitioner of broadcast journalism – you’ll know you’ve got just about all the angles covered in one bite here. This text contains an abundance of useful, easy-to-digest information.
The author stipulates that the book is intended to be a “practical guide to the practice of broadcast journalism in its widest sense and one that tries to give some context to broadcast reporting” (pp 3-4). It succeeds.
Barbara Alysen has deftly combined a training-manual style with a prosaic, anecdotal approach. And, as promised (p4), journalistic practice is not treated uncritically — the book also offers analysis, comment and critical evaluations that will provide good focal points for classroom discussion, or food for thought for the individual reader.
Where this text functions as a manual the information is often set out in tabular form, such as the section on how to throw to a soundbite (pp 111-113). Columns of tips are also scattered through the text (e.g. “tips on microphone technique” p 67), although unfortunately these are not identified in the list of contents. Diagrams (e.g. types of microphones, p 66) and flow charts (stages of a news story, pp 42-43) also help the uninitiated unravel the world of broadcast journalism. New ways of doing things are thus more easily identified and absorbed.
Alysen justifiably takes a few swipes at the media, backing up each one with examples, sometimes from print as well as broadcast. One such instance is where she deals with the vexed issue of public relations spin: “News often functions as an arm of the Public Relations (PR) industry, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes knowingly” (p 28).
The theory, the anecdotal, the critique and the practice have all been melded into a structure which makes an ideal teaching aid. It would be feasible to construct lecture schedules around each chapter topic, yet equally easy to draw from different chapters. For example, the first chapter ("Newsroom") starts literally at the beginning: what and who you see when you first set foot in a broadcast newsroom. The basis of the next chapter, "News sources", is equally applicable to print or broadcast - focussing first on news values - but Alysen sets it in a broadcast context.
The author has chosen not to separate television and radio into their own discrete chapters as broadcast texts often do. Instead she deals with the different components of the broadcast news process in different chapters - e.g. "News gathering and packaging" (chapter 3), "Recording sound and pictures" (chapter 4) - and outlines how these tasks are carried out for each media within the respective chapters. For example, she uses a story on a protest rally about Sydney's third runway to provide a radio 'worder' (i.e. a straight copy) version (page 35), followed by a television copy version (page 36).