All right, at the end of the last chapter, you had another crack at the Never Ending Story. At this point, you should have made corrections like these:

In a place where a rear-ender traffic accident is usually the biggest event of the day, there has been an event with an impact on everyone. Tonight the lives of three people have been claimed have been killed by a bomb, which set off a three-alarm fire that raised temperatures to almost 200-degrees at a clothing store in the heart of Fort Stutter, California, the police say. No group has taken credit responsibility for the blast, but forensics experts tonight are combing the scene of the attack. In case there is more danger there, a hazardous material team is dispatched to the scene. To explain why there was not a warning, the police chief of the city of Fort Stutter, Jazibeauz Perez (JAZZ-uh-boo PEAR-ehz), says there was definitely no sign that the bomb was going to explode, then he said, quote, “Everyone wishes to God we’d known this was going to transpire.” The chief says the police department hasn’t asked the F-B-I for help, the chief says. The dead include Jason Jones, Sally Smyth (Smith), and Greg Goldstein (Gold-steen). None were employees was an employee at the bombed store. Two unidentified men are in critical condition, meaning they might die too. Everyone in Fort Stutter is scared now to go out on the street, and city officials say increased protection will cost the people of Fort Stutter a lot of money, more than six million dollars, which would come to about two-hundred dollars per citizen. There is no date set for a decision about spending that amount of money, but the mayor cannot be back in town by Tuesday, which is not early enough for her critics. Whether it really will be helpful remains to be seen.

Well, the fact of the matter is, we can’t really, uh, I mean, we can’t find the gun, which we need to nail our suspect, so even though we’ve got him behind bars right now, we’re gonna have to let the guy go, which would really be unfortunate because, well, I guess the reasons are obvious if you consider all the possibilities, like he might, you know, maybe kill someone else, and he might, oh, who knows, he might get away from us before he faces justice. But believe you me, and I was telling my wife this very thing earlier this morning, or maybe it was yesterday, but the one thing for sure is, we’re going to keep looking for that weapon and when we find it, you can bet your life we’re going to arrest the guy again and put him away for life so he will never again roam the streets of Denver.

I’ve done it more than once. Instead of piquing the audience’s interest, I’ve burst the balloon before the speaker started speaking. In a story about a movement in Great Britain to legalize euthanasia (helping someone with an incurable illness to die), I had a sound bite in which an euthanasia advocate said:

I don’t think I would like to continue living longer than I want to do so. If left to nature, then you have no means of knowing. You may linger for a very long time and be very uncomfortable. And I see no point in it.

One advocate says, she wants to die with dignity.

That would have set up the audience to hear her personal sentiment. But I didn’t. Instead, I gave away the sound bite before anyone even heard it, by leading into it with:

One advocate says, she doesn’t know how long she’ll live, or how painfully she’ll die.

This can happen especially when you have only a sense of what the sound bite says, rather than the actual words on paper or on the computer screen in front of you (which shouldn’t happen). For instance, in this story I reported from England’s famous Wimbledon tennis tournament, I led into a sound bite with Martina Navratilova, the reigning champ at the time, this way:

Martina Navratilova, two-time Wimbledon woman’s champ, said the pressure to win is greater this year than it has ever been before.

The pressure is greater. Everyone expects you to win.

By the time she said “The pressure is greater,” I already had said it. The audience would be right to wonder, why did I include the sound bite at all? It would have been better if I had led into it with something like,

Martina Navratilova, two-time Wimbledon woman’s champ, said this year is unlike any other year.

You want your leadin sentence to flow almost seamlessly into the sound bite. Otherwise, the audience may need a moment to see the connection between the leadin and the sound bite. Once someone’s mind goes on pause to search for that connection, she has stopped following the story itself. Good flow creates continuity, which means the audience absorbs it better.

But like just almost everything else you’re learning in this book, this is more easily said than done. I probably have written several thousand leadin sentences, and undoubtedly could have done better with many. Here, for example, is what I wrote leading into a sound bite with Mrs. Ziolkowski, the wife of the man who decades ago started the colossal sculpture of the Native American chief Crazy Horse. It is in South Dakota, not far from Mt. Rushmore.

I think my excuse to the show’s producer in New York was that I was rushing to make the deadline. Lousy excuse. Good writing doesn’t take extra time, just extra thought.

DOBBS: Based on a scale model of Crazy Horse on his stallion, this mountain has been whittled away for 42 years now. Its sculptor was the late Korczak Ziolkowski who wrote, “When legends die, dreams end.”

SOT: Korczak always said time didn’t matter, it didn’t make any difference so long as we kept on working.

One thing had almost nothing to do with the other. In fact, it had absolutely nothing to do with the other. There was no flow. So anyone in the audience who actually thought about what I said, then about what Mrs. Ziolkowski said, could only scratch their heads. If I had made reference to the fact that the people still working on Crazy Horse today probably won’t live to see it finished, Mrs. Ziolkowski’s sound bite would have made much more sense.

Iowa is in the heartland. It also is one of the best educated states in the United States. So it’s a pretty good place to go for articulate opinion from the heartland. We went to get a feel for what heartland Americans thought about sending surplus grain to the drought-stricken Soviet Union, even though the Soviets still were America’s Cold War enemy. I interviewed lots of citizens, some off camera and some on. Just look at some of the concise, articulate sound bites I collected:

SOT: We can be generous and help and it won’t cost us a thing. (From a seed company executive.)

SOT: We are not gonna get disarmament in the world with hungry people out there. (From a big commercial farmer.)

SOT: If they’re gonna solve their own problems, I think they need to do it on their own. (From a small farmer.)

SOT: I think it’s just a whole new arena for us to sell our products in. Question: Good business? Answer: Absolutely. (From a man in the agricultural construction business.)

SOT: When I can properly take care of my own needs, then I can reach out and properly take care of other people. (From a Des Moines homeless shelter director.)

Now look at how poorly I wrote into three of them, by failing to make clear that these people had a financial stake in the proposal to sell grain to the Soviets.

DOBBS: Many here are bullish on helping the Soviets.

SOT: We can be generous and help and it won’t cost us a thing.

DOBBS: Garst says it’s better to help them than to fight them.

SOT: We are not gonna get disarmament in the world with hungry people out there.

DOBBS: At Stetson Building Products, despite the negative national poll, there’s a different point of view.

SOT: I think it’s just a whole new arena for us to sell our products in. Question: Good business? Answer: Absolutely.

If someone has expertise, or standing, or bias on an issue, make it clear. I didn’t.

In radio, when you’re writing your leadin, you have to tell us who’s about to speak, because we can’t see the speaker’s face (it’s radio, remember?) and unless it’s the President of the United States, most of us probably won’t recognize the voice. What this means is, whether it’s a sound bite with a famous actress or athlete or your city’s mayor, you must identify the speaker by name (and maybe title too) in your leadin before we hear the bite. However, sometimes you may not actually need the person’s name, when the person’s “authority” is more important. So leading into a sound bite with a witness to a shooting, you might simply write, “This woman was just three feet from the gunman.”

In TV this isn’t as important, because the CG can tell people visually who’s speaking, so you don’t have to in your script.

However, many television news leadin sentences also identify the upcoming speaker. In fact, many news directors require it, just to be sure it’s clear.

Therefore when I say, “Don’t just state the obvious,” make sure there’s a way for the audience to identify the speaker whose voice they’re about to hear. But don’t write a whole sentence simply identifying the speaker. An example? Let’s assume you’re leading into a sound bite with someone named Jennifer Smith. Ms. Smith witnessed an accident and says in her sound bite:

When the second car hit the guardrail, I thought it was going to go flying and come right through the window of my house. I thought my daughter and me were goners.

Give the audience information. Since Ms. Smith was witness to the accident, at the very least you could write for your leadin:

Of course as I’ve said before, there are exceptions to every rule. Although it is unimaginative, sometimes when your script already is running long and you want to save time, you can get away with simply stating the name of the person about to speak. So in the example with witness Jennifer Smith, you could lead into the sound bite with the shortest possible identification:

Sentences leading into a reporter’s package must follow the same rules as leadins to sound bites. Pretend I’m a reporter with your station and I’m covering the accident Ms. Smith saw, and you are writing the introduction to be read by the anchor. You’re focusing on the wrong thing—the reporter—if you write as your leadin:

Yuck! All that stuff wastes time. If I’m standing there with a couple of totaled cars behind me, then of course I’m at the scene of the crash. More important, those sentences all make it sound like the report is about the reporter. It isn’t. It’s about the accident. So just like the lesson above, where you learned to give the audience information, include some information about the story when you lead into reporter packages.

Playing off the speaker’s words really means playing to the audience’s ears. Using an actual word they just heard in the sound bite reinforces it, draws attention to it, and creates continuity with it. When you can, playing off a word or two is about the smoothest way to make your transition from sound bite to tag line. Here are several examples, just to make it clear.

One fun feature was about an American jockey named Steve Cauthen. He had fallen on hard times at home but jumpstarted his career in England. He became a champ. Midway through our story, we had a sound bite in which I asked a bookie named Gibbs whether he believed Steve Cauthen would become the winningest jockey in British history. His answer was:

“The betting’s finished.” Surely one word from the sound bite of the bookie would work well in the tag line. It did:

Another story from my limited world of sports was about the Sheep Dog Trials in Wales. A farmer must get his sheep dog to herd twenty sheep through a winding course and into a pen, using nothing but his natural whistle. I asked one contestant, “It’s you giving the commands, right?” and he answered,

Well, there were no words in this sound bite nearly as strong as the word “betting” in the Steve Cauthen story, but still, there might be a way to play off the words I had. There was:

Another example shows up in a story about the first man to pilot a balloon alone from the United States to Europe. He not only made it across the Atlantic, but all the way to Italy. The only flaw in the whole adventure was that he was thrown out of his balloon on impact and broke a bone in his foot. When we got to him, I asked:

This was easy. The tag line and closing line played off the word “injury” and became:

Finally, a nice use of the words from a sound bite in a Fourth of July feature from Paris about a little-known 151-foot high bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty. It was given to the French people by the American community in Paris, as thanks for the real statue, which had been made there. A former French ambassador to the United States told me that his own great grandfather had conceived of the original Statue of Liberty, then he ended with:

That one’s a winner. You can go in a dozen directions with those closing words, “in love with liberty.” Mine took me this way:

This is a bit tougher than playing off the sound bite’s words, but not much. All you have to do is think a little harder. Another semi-sports feature that serves as an example was a story about the game of darts, which is so popular in Great Britain that it’s televised. I had this exchange with an elderly woman watching a televised dart match in a pub.

SOT (Question) What do you think TV does for darts? (Answer) Oh, it’s made old people like me know what it’s all about. It’s made me know something I never knew in my life. (Question) So you like it? (Answer) Every part of it. TV is wonderful.

“TV is wonderful.” What a natural opening to the next part of the piece:

DOBBS: TV’s not only wonderful, but for some sports fans here in Britain, it’s also experimental.

The story went on to tell how lawn bowling and “snooker,” a kind of billiards, were about to be televised too.

Lest you forget that I worked for ABC News, not ABC Sports, here’s an example from a breaking news story about a 747 that was hijacked from Kuwait to Iran. The hijackers had just been overtaken. A former president of Iran who now lived in exile told us he blamed Iran’s radical government for the hijacking, ending his sound bite with,

SOT: Who are they to be judged by?

For the tag line, I played off the word “judged,” but more important, the tag line played off the idea of the sound bite by addressing his question:

DOBBS: Iran’s Prime Minister has said that the hijackers will be judged by Iran. They will not be extradited.

In a different version of the same story for another ABC show, we had a sound bite recorded before the hijacking ended with one of seven passengers who had been released, while the rest still were held hostage:

SOT: If you’re religious or not religious, pray for the people on board, pray all night for them.

Strong words, but I couldn’t find a way to use them verbatim in the time I had left to end the story. But I could play off their meaning:

DOBBS: But no one had to wait that long. After asking the hijackers by radio to do nothing before midnight, Iranian security forces moved in …

Since you usually have more information about a story than you can use, this is a bonus. Simply look at all the facts you have, and decide which ones you definitely want to include. Then see which one flows most logically out of the sound bite.

Having covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan back in 1979, I was asked to do a “progress report” five years later. I interviewed a spokesman for the muja-hedeen, the rebels then fighting the Soviets. He told me,

SOT The Soviets have destroyed a lot, but they have not won the favor of the people, and because of that, I think they do not achieve their aim.

At this point in the story, I had to turn a corner. I still wanted to make the following points.

• Westerners didn’t have much chance of seeing Soviet soldiers in combat.

• Soviet citizens at home were not being shown Soviet soldiers in combat.

• Originally having sent draftees to Afghanistan, now the Soviets were sending professional assault troops.

• The Soviets originally sent about fifty thousand troops to Afghanistan but now had one hundred thousand soldiers there, which they were calling “a limited contingent.”

• An estimated ten thousand Soviet soldiers already were dead

• The Soviets were providing food, fertilizer, and oil in exchange for the loyalty of some Afghanistani leaders.

Armed with those facts, I decided that the most logical thought to follow the mujahedeen spokesman’s sound bite was the one about troop strength, because it helped to reinforce what the spokesman had just said about the Soviets’ failure to “achieve their aim”:

DOBBS: Five years ago we watched as the Soviets rolled into Afghanistan, 50-thousand strong. Today, they have more than twice that number …

This financial story about a European consortium whose rockets lifted communications satellites into space is another example of using something that isn’t in the sound bite. It was attracting more business than the American space agency NASA. But the chairman of the company, called Ariane, told me they still had some technological hurdles to overcome.

SOT: For us, technology is only a tool, not an end in itself.

How he thought of technology didn’t really matter. How he ran his business did. That’s why I wrote this tag line out of the sound bite, which played a bit off his words but more importantly made a point he hadn’t directly made himself:

DOBBS: Ariane’s boss says his goal is not to excel in technology, but in business.

This one’s pretty obvious. If there is more than one side to a story, the sound bite provides one point of view; your tag line can provide the other. Here are a few quick examples, all coincidentally related to air travel and airplanes.

Back when passengers still were allowed to smoke in designated sections of airplanes, Congress was considering a bill to ban it, originally, just on flights of a certain duration. Our story had several consecutive sound bites with pilots, flight attendants, and even smokers who felt they could live with the ban. That told their side of the story. Then the tag line after the last sound bite gave the contrary view:

DOBBS: The Air Transport Association, which represents the airlines, opposes the ban. It argues that with flight delays, the law might be hard to interpret, hard to enforce.

A story about airport security had the Secretary of Transportation telling a committee of Congress:

SOT: We need to have the best possible security systems on both the public side of the airport and what is called the back side of the airport, the part the airport passengers seldom see.

DOBBS: In hearings just last week, an investigator with the General Accounting Office cited problems in that “back side” of airports, like ID badges missing by the thousands, and unchallenged access for people with no ID badges at all.

Finally, here’s a story we did near Fallon, Nevada, where all the U.S. Navy’s carrier pilots occasionally train to attack enemy targets. Ranchers in the remote desert east of Fallon complained about noise and vibrations. One of them said:

SOT The problem is, they cannot destroy the very people they have taken an oath and sworn to protect. And they have destroyed this valley and this people.

The tag line, giving the contrary point of view:

DOBBS: The Navy has responded to such complaints with restrictions to reduce the noise, like minimum distances and altitudes. But it says certain operations here are a necessary evil.