What sports-writers can teach us
What sports-writers can teach us about how not to communicate, knowing h.264 and h.265, a mind-blowing AI video tool, and a job vacancy telling investigative stories
Playing sports can be fun. Watching sports can be fun. Reading or listening about sports can be fun - but it can also teach us bad habits about how to tell our own factual stories.
Sports-writers usually create and publish two types of story. Objective news reports of a sporting team or person’s matches and results. And subjective analyses of their performance and actions, which invariably involves sharing the sport-writer’s opinions on the matter. Both are normal, and when done well, can be incredibly informative and engaging.
But sports-writers, perhaps more than most professional communicators, often go awry by conflating the two without letting the audience know. And by reflecting on their habit of doing so, we can learn a valuable lesson about how to better communicate.
“This was a wonderful, throwback performance from Barkley, whose goal had Luton leading in the second half and even dreaming of victory,”
The above quote is a real line, written this week within a sports report in The Times newspaper, published in the UK. It describes the performance of a player in a Premier League football (soccer) match.
But it’s a subjective view, contained within what is presented as an objective news report of the game’s result. It’s a sentence laden with subjectively chosen adjectives such as “wonderful” and “throwback” and presumes to know the minds of the Luton team’s players, who, in the reporter’s opinion, began dreaming of victory - when such a fact can never be known, unless they were all interviewed after the match and said as such, which is unlikely.
Such phrasing is common within sports reports, across different websites, publications and sports.
If you critically examine a number of sport reports, you’ll regularly see the writer introduce their own opinion into a match report, or report of a sporting occasion, at times even when the reader is unaware who has written the report, as it doesn’t have a byline.
It seems as though sports-writers have exempted themselves from the journalistic tradition of separating fact from opinion.
They do so, we suspect, because there tends to be less to say when reporting news of a sports result, beyond describing a series of events familiar to every game or event, and action that many fans have already seen.
Infusing a sports report with analysis and opinion adds interest, and can make a potentially dry, factual report more engaging to read or listen to. But when sport-writers fail to signpost that they are introducing their own views into their report about how well athletes performed, they risk confusing and alienating their audience (see our Factual Storytelling School lesson The Art Of Signposting).
In corporate communications, this is a dangerous approach and not one we’d recommend.
If you are communicating on behalf of your organisation, it’s important to separate out the reporting and sharing of facts, and opinions about those facts. You should maintain a consistent point of view (see our Factual Storytelling School lesson ‘Your Point Of View’). And you should clearly signpost to your audience what is fact, what is opinion, and whose opinion is being shared.
If you maintain that standard, your audience learns to trust what you say.
For example, let’s imagine a company publishes a financial report. But just as sports-writers conflate facts and opinion, they conflate factual information about their commercial position, with their own, somewhat biased view of how they are performing commercially.
Investors, customers and clients would naturally become suspicious about the company’s true position, and wonder what it is hiding from them. They’d prefer to see an objective report of the financial position and then separately hear about the company’s analysis of that position.
Know your h.264 and h.265
Here at The Factual Storytelling School, we recommend avoiding technical jargon and acronyms. More often then not, they are jarring or confusing to listen to, and rather than help your audience, they can create barriers to their understanding of your message.
However, sometimes their use is unavoidable. And this is one such time, because this week we’re asking technical-sounding, but important questions.
Do you know what h.264 and h.265 are, the differences between them, and how they can help you communicate your factual story to others?
Both are codecs, compression software that reduces video files to smaller, more usable file sizes.
For many years, h.264 has been the codec most used to export, publish and distribute high-definition digital video content. If you produce personal or corporate video content, you’d use the h.264 codec to encode videos to post online, to social media and embed within presentations and multimedia documents, as the codec balances minimal file size with optimal quality.
As you may expect, h.265 is a newer video compression standard. It encodes and compresses video using a different technique than h.264.
The technical differences aren’t important for most content creators. But h.265 is better than h.264, in that it more efficiently encodes movement in a video, so it’s a good choice to use if your video content is particularly dynamic. It also uses much less processing power to encode and around half the bandwidth to decode and play when published.
However, despite these improvements, we wouldn’t yet recommend rushing to use h.265 to encode and compress your videos.
h.265 hasn’t yet become widely embraced, as it requires more advanced computer hardware to deploy. It is also supported by fewer file formats, and isn’t supported by as many devices and internet browsers. (At The Factual Storytelling School we have a lesson explaining more about the differences between Files and Codes).
So your audience may be less able to actually see video you’ve produced using the h.265 codec. And as we regularly say, there is little point to creating and communicating content, if you’re audience can’t engage with it.
If you do have a computer able to easily implement the h.265 codec, it can help make live streaming of video more efficient. But despite its slightly inferior performance, h.264 remains the industry standard, and is the most suitable video codec for most personal and corporate communications.
For now, when it comes to h.264 versus h.265, it’s better to stay old school.
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A job vacancy telling investigative stories
The BBC, the UK’s national broadcaster, has a job vacancy for a longform investigations journalism researcher.
The role is to “originate and deliver investigations and high-impact stories across online, TV and radio. You will collaborate on commissions with colleagues across BBC Local and the wider BBC as appropriate. Primarily working with video, you will be required to reversion content across platforms.”
The job ad further states:
“Can you find and tell stories creatively that connect with audiences to get results?
Have you got strong journalism skills and bags of determination?
Do you innovate and have great communication and teamwork skills?
If the answer is yes to the above then working on the BBC Local Longform team could be the next role for you, bringing investigations and high-impact stories to large regional audiences across online, TV and radio.”
Find out more here. Closing date: 17 December 2023.