teasing the audience

What was it the Army used to say were the rules for lecturing? Tell 'em what you're going to say, tell 'em, then tell 'em what you've told them.

That worked in a certain age, but people's expectations have changed. Some radio journalists haven't changed with them.

The start of the Da Vinci Code trial was a good example - made all the more memorable because the story was about a story, which had been turned into a thriller: what a great opportunity to talk about the case using the rules of good storytelling..... This is what the BBC broadcast on the radio that day:

Two writers have begun an action in the high court in London for breach of copyright against the publishers of the best-selling novel “The Da Vinci Code”. The novel’s American author, Dan Brown, is in court to defend claims that he stole the theme of an earlier book, “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail”. Mr Brown’s novel has sold more than forty million copies worldwide. Our correspondent ……was in court

He’s reputedly the highest paid author in the world but today Dan Brown was in court to defend himself against a charge of plagiarism. He’s accused of stealing the central theme of his phenomenally successful religious thriller, The Da Vinci Code from a book written more than twenty years earlier. Mr Brown’s publisher, Random House, is being sued by two authors who say he copied parts of their book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Lawyers for Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh argued that although their book is a work of historical conjecture and Mr Brown’s is a murder mystery novel, there’s a clear theme running through both.

It starts from the theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalen. They had a child, and their bloodline continues to the present day. Random House insist that Dan Brown copied nothing. It claims that he wrote The Da Vinci Code after reading many sources that put forward the same idea. It says copyright law does not protect ideas. The judge, Mr Peter Smith, will hear evidence from all three authors next week. Today he questioned whether he’d have to order the destruction of millions of copies of The Da Vinci Code, or stop the imminent release of the Hollywood film, should he find against the book. Counsel for Mr Baigent and Mr Leigh said there was no intention to be commercially unreasonable.

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The cue makes it worse - it tells virtually everything you need to know about the story in the first 20 seconds. You need listen no more. What would happen to the sales of thrillers do if publishers wrote the blurb so that you could find out the ending without reading the book? It doesn't matter who the correspondent was, or the person who wrote the cue - 99 out of 100 people in today's radio news industry would have written it that way; which is a pity.

This blog seems to have got the idea