Audio Presence in News Organizations

I never noticed the importance of good audio until it was brought to my attention. When thinking about the importance of audio, I truly understand why it is so necessary to have excellent audio. When I heard my professor tell our class most viewers will tolerate low quality video but will skip over bad audio, my mind was blown. This week as I’ve researched and learned more about soundbites, this could not be more true. Within these last few days I have looked into a couple different stations and how they use audio to enhance their news. A great piece of audio can turn an average story into an attention grabbing one.

When researching different news outlets and how they use photography throughout their sites I noticed KBIA has a good amount of audio on their site. So I decided to circle back to KBIA and spend more time listening to their soundbites. I noticed KBIA does a morning and afternoon newscast for each day. They provide a brief description of the news covered in the audio and include interviews related to the topics. This allows listeners the ability to hear it first hand from the source themselves. The interviews provide a sense of truth and validation to what they newscaster is reporting on. I enjoyed being able to read a little information about the stories being covered before listening to the entire audio clip. One thing I might change is adding different audio clips other than just interviews.

National Public Radio was the next site I decided to look into. When first opening their website I was greeted by their top news story with a large photo and the link underneath to the audio. The story was covering the very recent death of Muhammad Ali. I truly enjoyed listening to this piece in particular. The way they added so many different interviews from people and Ali himself rounded out the piece beautifully. I also thought the way they incorporated music softly in the back during a particular piece of the story when mentioning how Ali “danced” around the ring was clever and appropriate. Their use of not only fantastic audio but pictures and text really allowed me to grasp the story as a whole.