News Vs Documentaries

News Vs Documentaries

I will be exploring and comparing the similarities and differences between The News and Documentaries.

News Channels broadcast their information in a very different way compared to a documentary. The News channels give us audience members minimal information about a matter or cause. They give a brief overview of the story, this overview will mainly include live or archive footage. A story can be presented by either 1 or more presenters speaking about a story or they will have news presenters at the scene speaking live about the news. In some situations news channels may have guest speakers or even witnesses speaking, this will obviously depend on the story. The news will also occasionally have one to one interviews, this is where wither the presenters is speaking either face to face with someone or over satellite. Some news channels have a ticker bar which tells you things that are happening at that exact time, this will instantly be updated when a new story is released.

Documentaries will explore a pacific document in a lot more depth and detail. Documentaries do the useful job of exploring a story or matter in a lot more detail for example in the Bin Lade: Shoot to kill documentary the audience is given a first hand account from the men and women who were responsible for taking down Osama Bin Landen. The documentary is based around the reasons why Bin Laden was the most wanted terrorist and talking about the day they would finally capture him and eventually kill him.

There is quite an obvious difference between a news program and a documentary. This is, the news is always live and read from a TelePrompTer and includes voice-overs and short clips between reports, however documentaries are usually pre-recorded before being broadcasted on television.
News reports usually inform the audience on the key facts about a story whereas documentaries go into a lot more detail about these facts or stories instead of highlighting the key points.
In both The news and the Bin Laden documentary narration is shown. It is most likely that whilst The News is on new stories are being released this can then be shown through narration on screen.

The layout for a News Channel and a Documentary are extremely different.
The mise-en-scene for a news channel is usually two presenters live in a studio presenting the viewers with the top headlines and news stories across the world, they would usually be sat behind a fairly high desk with screens behind them and in some cases ticker bars will be shown on screen. They will usually start but quickly a quick overview of some of the stories they are going to viewing on todays show they also show some pictures of the topics they are going to be discussing. They then go on to speak about the headlines and stories. In some cases they have other presenters and the scene of the story reporting back to the studio .
 The mise-en-scene for documentaries will always be changing depending on the chosen topic, all documentaries are difference and will be documented and shown in a different way. The majority of documentaries will have a narrator, director and even a scientist or someone who the documentary is based on to back up their facts.