1. Introduction
Every day, many people tune in to radio news. In Britain alone, every week over 12 million listen to news bulletins from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on five radio networks.
The language of the news media, especially of radio news, offers a number of areas which are worth researching and investigating. An investigation of the linguistic features of the language in radio news - similar to any other investigation - needs a definition of what is to be studied.
I will start by providing some background information to the topic 'radio', namely by summing up the most important events in the history of radio. After illustrating the most interesting turning points of the development of radio in the past, I will talk about radio news in general, before I will explain specific details about how to write and read a news text for a radio station. The last chapter includes full transcriptions of two radio texts and 'normal' newspaper texts as well as their analyses and comparisons. I will have a look at similarities and differences on radio writing and newspaper language.
2. The History of Radio
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.
Do you understand this?
And radio operates in the same way: You send signals here; they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat".
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