This is one of 10 essays I offer as we close 2021 that I hope will help broadcast journalists tell stronger stories in the year ahead.
Almost always, almost always, the best sound bites are thoughts, opinions, feelings and emotions that come from the subject of the story. Once you learn this lesson, you will nearly instinctively pluck sound bites out of news conferences, speeches, trials and interviews.
I used this technique 28 years ago this week. I had learned it in a college classroom decades before.
I mentioned in part one of this series on powerful writing that when Edward R. Murrow told the story of soldiers serving in Korea just before Christmas, Murrow chose to tell the stories through the soldiers, not the generals. On Christmas Eve in 1993, I found myself covering a story about soldiers and war. I was assigned to cover the predawn return to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were back from their tour of duty as “peacekeepers” in Somalia.
It had been a particularly difficult and deadly mission. Americans entered Somalia with the good intention of feeding starving people, but soldiers were drawn into gunfights with local warlords. Somalis dragged soldiers’ bodies through the streets. You may remember that from the book and movie “Black Hawk Down.” Now, most of the 101st were coming home.
I knew that, in all likelihood, there would be 12 or more television cameras at the event. I guessed that most of us were walking into the story with the same focus: Soldiers come home.
How could we do something different, something more memorable?
Driving to that story at 4 a.m. on that cold Christmas Eve, photojournalist Randy Palmer and I made a quick list of what we thought we might photograph and include in the story. The list included:
- Families waiting
- People giving soldiers gifts
- A military band
- Tears and people crying
- The airplane
- Soldiers getting off the plane
- Officials making speeches
- Flags
- File and other historic pictures from Somalia
- People cheering
We knew that every other crew covering the story had a similar checklist in mind. We asked ourselves if there were other possibilities. We considered:
- Someone who is coming home but has no one waiting for him or her
- Going beyond the typical picture of a soldier coming home to find the husband of a female soldier who has been waiting for her return
- Whether families of soldiers who died in Somalia would be there
- Whether families of the soldiers still in Somalia would be there
The Army gave us no access to the waiting families until moments before the plane landed. All of the TV crews scrambled to get shots of the taxiing charter transport plane. Palmer also got wide shots of the crowded tarmac and panned the cheering assembled crowd. All the while, I was walking through the crowd, looking for an interesting character.
We stuck by the side of a woman and her young son who were standing there shivering in the cold, holding flowers for their soldier. We hung a wireless microphone on Marla Denson and kept rolling from the moment the military transport came in view. Keep rolling, no matter what.
I wrote:
TOMPKINS: Marla Denson has been here before on the airport tarmac … waiting. To be an Army wife, you have to get good at waiting.
MARLA: Come on, you ready to go see Daddy?
(Close-up of shivering son)
TOMPKINS: Her husband, Charles, left for Somalia in August. When he left, the Army’s mission in August was to feed a million starving Africans. (File tape) But the mission changed into an ugly shooting war. Marla knows that other families have waited in her same spot. Their husbands will never come home.
MARLA: It’s their jobs, they have to do it, they have to do it.
TOMPKINS: How do you get good at waiting?
MARLA: Prayer, God, family and friends; them’s the four things. If you don’t have them, you can’t make it.
TOMPKINS: Judy Gross has gotten good at waiting. She has spent 20 years waiting for her husband, the colonel, to come home from this place or that. This is an unexpected blessing, because nobody knew they were coming home until two days ago. (Natural sound of cheering — people coming off the plane)
JUDY GROSS: Christmas when he was in Saudi, we just kept him in our thoughts and our prayers and we drank a toast to him on Christmas Eve, and that is about all you can do. You just have to think positive thoughts when they are not around.
TOMPKINS to Marla: What did you say when you heard he was coming in?
MARLA: I love you. (laughs) I have to love him. He did his job and now it is over.
TOMPKINS: One by one, the reunions happened around her. (Pictures of a mother screaming, then hugging her daughter) Parents screamed at the sight of their children. Husbands held closely to their wives in uniform. (Picture of hands) But she waited. (Picture of Marla straining to see the plane) She began to think, maybe he wasn’t on this plane. (Pause) Maybe there was a problem.
MARLA (still looking past the camera, squinting, watching the last few soldiers come down the stairs from the plane): You have to be the mother and the father while they are gone. You have to do everything together. (In the distance — a man shouts, Hey — hey!)
MARLA: That’s you! That’s you! I love you, Charles! I love you; I love you, I love you, I LOVE you, Charles, I love you, I love you, I love you.
(She kisses him repeatedly as Charles struggles to hold his hand out to his young shivering son who has waited silently.)
CHARLES (to his son as he picks him up): Hey — hey man, come here!
TOMPKINS: Corporal Charles Denson was home, home to be with his wife and his son. She brought him a rose, because, she said, he was always bringing her roses. She worried her hair didn’t look right; she asked him a thousand times if he was okay. One hundred and fifty other Fort Campbell soldiers are still in Somalia tonight. What they wouldn’t give to be where he is. He is home for Christmas.
Al Tompkins, Channel 4 News, Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Great stories turn on great sound bites. Let’s use the “Soldier Comes Home” story to study what makes a sound bite work well.
Here are the sound bites we used:
MARLA: It’s their jobs, they have to do it, they have to do it.
MARLA: Prayer, God, family and friends; them’s the four things. If you don’t have them, you can’t make it.
JUDY GROSS: Christmas when he was in Saudi, we just kept him in our thoughts and our prayers and we drank a toast to him on Christmas Eve, and that is about all you can do. You just have to think positive thoughts when they are not around.
TOMPKINS to Marla: What did you say when you heard he was coming in?
MARLA: I love you. (laughs) I have to love him. He did his job and now it is over.
MARLA (still looking past the camera, squinting, watching the last few soldiers come down the stairs from the plane): You have to be the mother and the father while they are gone. You have to do everything together. (In the distance — a man shouts, Hey — hey!)
MARLA: That’s you! That’s you! I love you, Charles! I love you, I love you, I love you, I LOVE you, Charles, I love you, I love you, I love you.
Look carefully at those sound bites. What do you notice? None of the bites contain facts. They are opinions, emotions and observations from the people who are closest to the story. Nobody else could have said what those people said with the same authenticity.
Be careful, though: Don’t fall in love with a sound bite. If it does not relate to the main meaning of the story, drop it. Focus matters more than a sound bite.
Now let’s look at the copy — the words I spoke as the reporter.
TOMPKINS: Marla Denson has been here before on the airport tarmac … waiting. To be an Army wife, you have to get good at waiting.
TOMPKINS: Her husband, Charles, left for Somalia in August. When he left, the Army’s mission in August was to feed a million starving Africans. (File tape) But the mission changed into an ugly shooting war. Marla knows that other families have waited in her same spot. Their husbands will never come home.
TOMPKINS: Judy Gross has gotten good at waiting. She has spent twenty years waiting for her husband, the colonel, to come home from this place or that. This is an unexpected blessing, because nobody knew they were coming home until two days ago.
TOMPKINS: One by one, the reunions happened around her. (Pictures of a mother screaming, then hugging her daughter) Parents screamed at the sight of their children. Husbands held closely to their wives in uniform. (Picture of hands) But she waited. (Picture of Marla straining to see the plane) She began to think, maybe he wasn’t on this plane. (Pause) Maybe there was a problem.
TOMPKINS: Corporal Charles Denson was home, home to be with his wife and his son. She brought him a rose, because, she said, he was always bringing her roses. She worried her hair didn’t look right, she asked him a thousand times if he was okay. One hundred and fifty other Fort Campbell soldiers are still in Somalia tonight. What they wouldn’t give to be where he is. He is home for Christmas.
What do you notice about the copy? In this story, the copy includes all the facts and details that explain what viewers are seeing on the screen that they would not understand if I didn’t explain.
I didn’t say in the copy, “She hugged and kissed him. She was so happy to see him.” Viewers could see that. I wanted viewers to know what Marla said she worried about (her hair); I wanted them to know why she brought him a rose (because he was always bringing her roses).
Once you learn and teach others this guideline of subjective sound (opinions and emotions) and objective copy (the facts and details), you won’t have to settle for those awful and predictable interviews that producers too often see from police or public information officers. Anyone who has conducted an interview with a stiff-talking police officer knows what the typical interview includes.
REPORTER: What do we have here, Officer?
OFFICER: We have a white male, shot twice with a large caliber weapon. The deceased died on the scene. An investigation is underway.
The only story focus that would come out of that line of questioning would be: “Shooting kills man.” It is not a new or even interesting story. Every producer groans when he or she hears that interview. Some news directors, in an act of frustration, have even banned interviewing officials in an attempt to get rid of the objective sound bite.
Questions that include the word “what” usually produce responses that are factual. “What time is it?” “What happened here?” They are important questions, but the answers usually produce better copy than sound bites.
Producers and photojournalists must coach their reporter colleagues to ask subjective questions.
How about this:
REPORTER: Officer Jones, you were the first person on the scene. What went through your mind when you saw this body in the middle of the street?
OFFICER JONES: I said to myself, not again. This is the third murder this month.
REPORTER: You have been working this side of town a long time. How safe is our town?
OFFICER JONES: I think the city is safe, but this area right here, these ten city blocks are a real problem. We’ve got to get a handle on this. This is crazy.
This interview might give us the basis for a much more interesting focus: “Murder troubles officer.”
The subjective sound bite guideline also makes it easier to pick bites from speeches and long ceremonies. Be alert for the opinion, feeling or emotion. That is the bite that creates the lump in the viewer’s throat.
I sometimes ask participants in my seminars and workshops whether any of them struggled with math. Invariably, hands shoot up (an interesting common trait of journalists). I ask the participants if they remember being asked, in the fourth grade, to go to the board and work out a math problem in front of the class. Of course, they do. I ask why they remember that, and the answers are touching.
High-powered professional journalists confess in front of a crowd that they were embarrassed by how they felt when they got the answer wrong in front of their class. But then I ask a key question, “What was that problem you were trying to work out?” Of course, nobody remembers. The illustration is complete; they remember what they feel far longer than what they know.
I believe this ability to teach through feelings is the key strength of video, especially television. Other media have other strengths. There is something about the tactile nature of newspapers or even smartphones that allows me to learn by cognitively interacting with the information. I can read it again and again to understand the story and information more deeply. The internet allows me to learn by interacting with information on the screen. Radio allows me to learn by imagining.
But television is unique in its ability to teach through emotions and sensory experiences.
(Parts of this essay come from my college textbook, “Aim for the Heart.”)
Al Tompkins will expand on his storytelling and writing teaching in two Poynter seminars: The Poynter Producer Project and TV Power Reporting. Click the links to see the schedules, meet our all-star visiting faculty and apply. Thanks to a grant from CNN, we offer 50% tuition scholarships to NABJ, NAHJ, AAJA, NAJA and NLGJA members. Both seminars take place over three days at Poynter in St. Petersburg, Florida, or you can attend virtually.
