Final 3 Greens
Excellent post F3G
You're getting there, but you're not there yet.
To take the BBC Online story as an example, that journalist had just 314 words to work with, headline included. You’ve done well to explain one element of the story in 86 words, but there are still eight or nine other elements to include and you’ve already used more than a quarter of the space available.
See how tricky this is becoming?
Broadly the same is true in TV reporting. You don’t have the luxury of so much time. And you’ll put your audience to sleep with that much detail, I'm afraid. Remember, it's the man on the street we're writing for here.
Hope you don’t feel knocked back by what I’ve said, your piece would sit very well in a magazine feature or a radio documentary where the space exists to go into detail. It is just that news reporting is a different animal.
This is how and why complex news stories get boiled down into all too few words, and how complete clarity must often be sacrificed. Those close to the story, such as pilots in this case, should not be irked by such brevity and the simplification it brings. They are not the target audience, afteral.