Video News Releases for TV stations

A communications department can draft a news release and send it out to a number of television stations. Sometimes a news director will bite, while other times a development can languish in obscurity. So, to improve the odds of getting a story on the air, many organizations develop video news releases, also knows as VNRs.

“Government agencies, like corporate and nonprofit interests, have information to get to the public,” said Michael Sheward, executive director of the National Association of Government Communicators. It’s no surprise that one of the best ways of reaching the public is through television,” so to enhance a message’s ability to be broadcast, communications professionals in have implemented the use of the VNRs as a way to add pictures to the typical print news release.”

Perhaps this description sounds like a PSA, but Patrick O’Leary, senior television producer/reporter at the USDA’s Office of Communications, said there’s a big difference. “A PSA is like a commercial, which runs in a 30, 60, or sometimes 10 or 20-second length and is placed in commercial breaks,” he explained. “A VNR is really a television story, a news story meant to be incorporated into a stations’ news broadcast.”

Feed The Beast

The basic idea is that the VNR’s presented information and pictures will seamlessly blend into the look and feel of a TV station’s programming. When you adopt the look of a standard TV news story, your VNR has a greater chance of being accepted into a newscast.

VNRs aren’t just run on local news stations, however. David Crawford, director of Media Relations for the Ohio State University Medical Center, said that his association uses VNRs monthly to “highlight the clinical aspects of medicine and research findings,” and that this information can end up anywhere in the country.

Sheward added that the VNR target market is much large today, as networks and markets of all sizes have a greater news hole to fill. “Television is the beast that must be fed,” he said. “Many stations are getting on the air at five or six in the morning with an hour or two of local news. Networks pick up from seven to nine or 10 in the morning. Some local stations will have a noon newscast; they’ll come back again at four or five with local news, pick up the network broadcast at 6:30 or seven, and then again at 10 or 11, depending on your time zone. That’s five or six hours a day.

“TV has to have content to fill that time,” said Sheward. “You can’t just have an anchor at the desk reading for an hour.”

Depending on your organization, there may be niche media outlets with needs that dovetail yours perfectly. Such is the case with the USDA; they’re in the business of agriculture and there’s an entire genre of broadcasting dealing specifically with farms. Two programs, AgDay and U.S. Farm Report, frequently broadcast USDA VNRs. “UY.S. Farm Report actually treats me as their Washington reporter,” said O’Leary. “We can tell our partners here within the USDA that their message is actually getting placed and reaching, in this case, 150 stations.”

Some Assembly Required

A VNR, however, isn’t going to be placed on 150 stations if it’s not up to snuff. When creating a video news release, it’s important to use the same professional production standards that television news departments follow for their own work. A lower quality production will stick out like a sore thumb and detract from the overall newscast.

“They’re not going to say, ‘Excuse this video –it was produced by someone else,’” joked Sheward. “Make your material top quality so that it matches what these stations use.”

A good VNR will also be succinct, as news directors only have a limited amount of air time to devote to any story. “The average TV news story (with visual) is anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute and a half,” Sheward estimated. “The VNR needs to be packaged in that sort of time frame of have the ability to be cut and pasted into that.” If you’d like to get a station to spend a longer amount of time on your story, Sheward suggested editing it into chunks so that it could be aired, for example, as a three-day report.

It should be noted that “VNR” can refer to either a complete story or a whole package of information surrounding your story. Sending out a complete package to news organizations is a nice way to increase your chances of getting your material aired, as you are providing the media outlet with options.

Include a self-contained story with B-roll. And if you use specific charts or graphics in your story, Sheward advised that you run the graphics again without the type. “Sometimes stations are very judicious in wanting everything on their broadcast to be in their chosen type-font or face,” he explained. “So you give them the opportunity to use your graphic but to put up their own verbiage in their typeface.”

In addition, a VNR’s content should resemble a real news report as much as possible. “Make it something that news directors will see as news,” emphasized O’Leary. “You want to look for some angle that will make it seems like a real news story.”

VNRs are most frequently distributed via satellite transmission, followed by tape. Some organizations simply notify stations of the material and direct them to a Website were the VNR can be downloaded. The USDA, however, posts its VNRs on its Web site not for distribution, but for additional public exposure.

“I think VNRs are ideal for Web sites – it’s another way for us to put information out to the public,” said O’Leary. “Watching a 90 second VNR on a Web page is the kind of activity people like to do on Web sites. It’s a way to tell the story and, because they are so short, they don’t take a lot of bandwidth to archive on a server.”

A Question Of Ethics

There can, however, be a problem with VNRs looking too much like news stories. The Bush administration and the Department of Health and Human Services recently came under fire for its VNRs, which focused on the benefits of the new Medicare drug bill. Among other shots, these VNRs feature pictures of President Bush receiving a standing ovation and a pharmacist telling an elderly customer that the new law is “a very good idea”.

Because these VNRs look like regular, unbiased news stories (as well-crafted VNRs are designed to do) center on controversial – and highly politicized – legislation, many question the ethics behind news stations using video news releases. As a result, the Radio-Television News Directors Association released a statement reaffirming its belief in its guidelines on VNRs, which were developed more than a decade ago.

“RTNDA does not endorse the use of so-called video news releases,” the statement read, “but neither do we reject their use, as long as that use conforms to the association’s Code of Ethics …(which) calls on radio and television journalists to guard against using audio or video material in a way that deceives the audience.”

In essence, the RTNDA puts the onus on journalists to determine what is and what is not biased. After this firestorm, however, it pays to develop a VNR that is completely honest and as unbiased as possible. “VNR is kind of a dirty word in the news industry,” said O’Leary. “There are a lot of broadcasters who say, ‘We’d never use a VNR; that’s basically a fake news story.’”

This doesn’t mean, however, that organizations should throw in the VNR towel. A VNR can find a home on the air, provided that it’s impartial and uncolored. News organizations “are not going to run something that doesn’t pass the sniff test for impartiality,” said O’Leary. “They’re not going to get placed if they are blatantly partisan. Our role here as reporters and producers is to disseminate info as factually as we can.”

Written by: Laura Kenyon