34. Nail your news voice
As one of Australia's only voice coaches who used to be a broadcast journalist, I have heaps of practical tips and tricks to sound natural, credible and clear!
Transcript
Hello, I'm Sally Prosser with your That Voice Podcast news update. We lead this episode with three ways to nail your news voice.
I'm Sally Prosser. You're listening to That Voice Podcast no matter who you are or what you do, your voice matters. So unless you've sworn a lifetime vow of silence, this is the podcast for you.
Welcome, welcome. Thank you so much for tuning in. Let me ask, are you a journalism student keen to get into broadcast? Maybe you're still at school and think it might be a career for you? Perhaps you're just curious about how and why reporters have that news voice? or maybe you listen to every episode of my podcast and hold a very special place in my heart. Whatever the reason you're here today, welcome. Broadcast journalism has been a big part of my career and is now still a big part of my business. My first job was at 96.5 Wave FM in Wollongong. Big shout out to Rob Gooda who taught me so much about journalism and also about voice. Before I'd started there, I'd been used to being on stage. You know at eisteddfods and in school musicals and so my voice was quite theatrical.
Let me just tell you, reading news at 5:30 AM on a commercial radio station is very different to delivering a Shakespearian monologue. Okay, so then I went to i98FM in Wollongong. I also read the news at C91.3 in Campbelltown for a while. I then went up to Rockhampton and I was running the Central Queensland bureau for channel Seven. After a couple of years I moved down to Brisbane and I was working as a producer and reporter freelancing at channel 10 here in Brisbane. I also did a little bit of work for the ABC. Then I went into public relations and then I went into starting my own business. And that whole time I was working as a journalist I was helping other journalists with their voice on the side, a bit of a side hustle kind of thing and now I work with journalists all over the country and I absolutely love it.
If you'd like to work with me, there are a couple of ways. If you're a working journalist now, then just get in touch with me and we can have sessions straight away. If you're still a student then you need to start with my online course. It's called Miked Up and the online course you get $200 off if you're a uni student and it also includes a free session with me, so it's pretty good value and you'll find that if you go to my website, www.sallyprosser.com.au/journalists and you'll find all the details there. Now before I get into the three ways that you can nail your news voice, I thought I'd answer a frequently asked question and that is why do all news reporters sound the same? To me there are differences in saying that a little bit of diversity in Australian news media wouldn't go astray.
I'm sure you'd agree with me there, but why is the quality of voice similar? Well, I would say the first thing is the writing style. The average news story's about 1.10 mins maybe 1. 20 and that's with grabs, which are the little pieces of talking head so you haven't got a lot to work with. And therefore the writing is very, very concise. And because the writing style is quite similar, then that encourages a similar phrasing style. On top of that, as a news reporter, your voice needs to be clear so it can be understood. The tone needs to be credible and so generally you'll get that nice lower sounding voice. And finally, as a news reporter, as much as you can be, you want to be impartial or objective. So if we use an example like there was an armed holdup in the main street of Sydney, there was an armed holdup in the main street of Sydney today, you know, you're not getting all of those expressive vocal devices that you might be using in a speech or a phone call or lots of other types of voice work.
Okay, so I'm going to cover today three main areas to work on to nail your news voice - phrasing, tone and clarity. And these are the areas that I delve into in a lot more detail in my Miked Up online course. We'll talk about them briefly now.
So the first one is phrasing. You want the news to sound conversational and fluent, not 'sing songy' or what I call 'jerky jerk'. And I'll borrow a line out of one of my student's scripts this week. She won't mind. "It's a small win for Queenslanders. Our state has no new cases for the first time since mid March." The phrasing contend to go into a sing song like "it's a small win for Queenslanders. Our state has no new cases for the first time since mid March." Right. So that's one style you often get when you first start out. The other one is jerky jerk, which is too many pauses."It's a small win for Queenslanders. Our state has no new cases for the first time since mid-March." So how do you stop doing that? Well, the first one is deciding what words to emphasize. You've got to look at the meaning of the story and bring out those words. The next thing to look at is when to pause. Generally news reporters when they're starting out take far too many pauses and it breaks up the flow. The last thing with phrasing is to look at what I call the grunt words or the buried words. And these are the tiny words in sentences which are purely there to sound like we know English. We don't want them to be standing out at all. So these tiny grunt words are words like have and for and from and of. They should always be, hev, teh, frem, ev, like they're not even there. So if we take that line, "our state has no new cases for the first time since mid-March. " See how I say cases for the first time, not cases FOR the first time for becomes fe.
All right number two is tone. We want the tone to be warm and credible, warm and credible. And this goes for any type of voice work, any type of speaking. The acronym I use in the course is RBT, but instead of random breath test, you think of R for ready. B for breathing and T for tone. Ready means look at what you're doing with your body. Are you hunched over the microphone? Are you leaning your head up to the microphone or looking down? That will prevent your best voice from coming up. So one of the easiest things you can do is to make sure that the microphone moves to you and you don't move to the microphone. The second thing is breathing. I talk a lot about breathing in lots of podcast episodes. You want to be breathing low and deep, which can be challenging for reporters because they have to get around in these nice tight pencil skirts - female reporters anyway, and often you're quite stressed, you're coming up to deadline, there's a million things going on, you're feeling very stressed and so there's a lot of tension usually. If you get rid of your attention and can breathe low and deep, then the vibrations of the voice can sit more in the walls of the chest and that's how you'll get that nicer tone rather than being up here.
The third area, and this is in the course as well, is clarity making the word sound clear. Three tips I'll share with you today. The first one is opening the jaw and that's so the vows sound clear and also the words in general, sound clear. If you don't open your jaw, you just sound like you're mumbling too much. The next one is to take note of the ends of words. When we're speaking conversationally, we drop the ends of words so, so much, but in broadcast we want to be really clear. For example, the word heart has a T on the end. We want heart instead of hear. Actually T's a great one. Oh, should I say great one? I compare the clarity of speech to colouring in. If you go out of the lines once or twice, the whole picture still looks pretty good, but if you're going out of the lines all the time dropping all of these sounds all over the place, the whole thing looks messy and your overall sound will be messy and you definitely don't want that. Another really important thing for news journalists is to make sure we get the names of people and places correct. I remember when I was reading news on the local radio station and it was in January, so it was Australian Open time and oh my goodness, trying to say all of those tennis names was really challenging. I would write them all out in phonetics and I would practice and practice. It's live radio. It's tough, right? You stuff some things up. It's normal, but every time I even said one name a little bit wrong, I would always get an email or a phone call from an avid tennis fan saying, "Oh, you're an idiot. Don't you know how to pronounce anything?", And look, that can be quite distressing when you're a young journalist and you've only had three hours sleep. You do learn to develop a thick skin. People will notice if you can't say names or places correctly.
All right, so recap. The first one is phrasing how to sound fluent. You've got to think about what to emphasize when to pause and what are those little grunt words that disappear into the background. Number two, we think about our tone. RBT. Are we ready? Is the breathing good? Is the tone sitting in our chest? Finally, clarity, opening the jaw, not forgetting the ends of words and pronouncing names and places correctly.
I know this was a very, very quick overview today, so if you'd like more information, please jump onto www.sallyprosser.com.au/journalists and check out the course.
Next week I'm having another journalist on the podcast. He's a very dear friend of mine. We met while working together in Rockhampton and he's currently the US correspondent for 10 News First, I'm talking about Eammon Ashton-Atkinson. I haven't even recorded this year because I wanted to be as fresh as possible for you when it drops next Monday. Hope you can join me.
Thanks for listening to That Voice Podcast. All episodes with full transcripts are at www.thatvoicepodcast.com.