The headlines this hour:

Captioning the news might be a counterintuitive role for a live captioner. After all, your evening newshour is a tightly regimented machine, diligently fact-checked, read by a flamboyantly stodgy and resolutely Anglo older upper-middle-class baritone in a suit, abetted by a tersely professional, shoulder-padded alto, who is five years younger and has to work twice as hard and earn 30% less to survive and excel in her tenaciously chauvinist newsroom.

You know the guy.

Or, you watch SBS/ABC. Point is, news is surely meticulously pre-written, right? Even the obligatory meteorological larrikinism is tightly contained, relegated to its half-hourly whirlwinds of high-pressure-low-pressure interactivity. There’s a reason why both cute animal TV news stories and news anchor bloopers enjoy such guaranteed virality. It’s because broadcast news canonises and dignifies its content, that implacable prestige makes the anchor a perfect comic straight-man on par with Sideshow Bob.

Don't blame me, I voted Quimby.

It’s safe, it’s true, it’s the first draft of history written right there on the autocue (or teleprompter if that's your hemisphere). So if it’s all written ahead of time, why couldn’t it be relegated to an offline captioner? Why, in effect, don’t they just flip around the autocue for hearing impaired viewers to read? Why do they need us?

Errant question marks notwithstanding.

Well, it’s basically because the TV news isn’t just written. It’s also compiled. You’ve probably got five separate headlines, written by five separate people, then the opening music sting, then the anchor’s greeting written or improvised by him or herself, then the anchor throwing to the Sport Reporter With Eyes Too Close Together for a summary of the top sport story, then to the Enthusiastic Weatherperson for a 10-words-or-less version of the weather, before the anchor reads an intro to the top story (written by a sixth reporter). The anchor will then say “Our correspondent, Reporter Number Six sent this report, from In Front Of Something.” Then there will be a VT, or prerecorded package sent by Reporter Number Six. It could include background information, CCTV footage, interviews with key players or random vox pops, allegedly intercepted phone calls, shots of documents and plenty more. Anything which can be compiled and tidily put together before the news goes to air. But the story isn’t done yet! The anchor may then cross live to Reporter Number Six, who is still on the scene In Front Of Something, for the latest breaking developments. Then the anchor crosses live to an Academic With A Beard, for an interview discussing the geopolitical ramifications of The Thing That Happened.

“I'm a sceptic about the anthropogenic nature of Donetsk.”

That brings us to the end of one story. Probably four minutes into the broadcast. At least five people have spoken, at least nine have contributed either written or improvised verbal content. Between two and four were reading from an autocue, at least two were not. And any part of the story is subject to any amount of revision, and if Surprise Momentous Thing happens, or the VT or satellite feed fails, then The Thing That Happened might be bumped down the order, or out of the broadcast entirely.

So the role of a news captioner is similarly one of compiling a linear narrative from an array of moveable building blocks. At some point, close to the time of broadcast, the running order or rundown becomes available*. The exact mechanism varies between newsrooms, but it typically includes the full text for whatever is going in the anchor’s autocue, the order of stories with estimated times, blocks mapped out for commercial breaks, instructions (usually in a different colour) for those in charge of the visual aspects of the broadcast (cuts, wipes, VTs, crosses etc). The news will usually ultimately be captioned in a hybrid way, with some aspects cued out live from available text, and others voiced. So the captioner’s first task is to tidy the immediately available autocue script. It will be designed to be read aloud, so things like expressive punctuation (a comma, for every pause, even those, which would look odd in print), phonetic spelling, longhand numbers (“six-point-two-five-billion-dollars were wiped off the A-S-X this morning…”) need to be removed. This script needs to be kept in identifiably separate segments, so that stories can be bounced around the rather fluid running order in real time.

*Or, the technology gets the hiccups, and it doesn’t. In which case the captioner gets an extra glass of water, and a tragically non-Irish coffee, and gets ready to do an awful lot of fast talking.

Now, that VT. It’s true, someone will have written it. But it was probably a reporter in the field, and they probably didn’t send a script for it back to the network. And it’s very possibly not on the rundown, because it doesn’t need to be. It’s a prerecorded video, it’s not like it will forget or change its lines. All they’ll need is the first and last words, so the anchor knows when to come in. Even if the reporter did write a script, they probably didn’t see the need to transcribe their interview subjects’ responses. But we want it all, our viewers need the full auditory experience. Luckily, that’s not the end of the story. VTs don’t change, so they can be reused. If we’re captioning a 24-hour news channel, or a breakfast program that goes for a few hours, we can lift the previous hour’s output, find the VTs, check the proper nouns, fix the errors, and use it again. Same goes for different timezones – if your colleagues have captioned the east coast, and you’re on the west coast, they might have done some of your heavy lifting.

After all, some stories develop more quickly than others.

So now, we just need to get ready for that live cross to Reporter Number Six, and the interview with Academic With A Beard. Now that will have to be done live, no way around that, but looking through the rundown and the VT, we know what they’re going to talk about. We can see what new words Dragon will need to be taught, and what hard-to-say words might be programmed in with verbal shortcuts.

Or as I might say, "Word One"

So the news starts. Exciting, bracing music by an Oscar-Nominated Composer plays. We cue out the headlines, they switch the third and fourth stories but some fancy clicking and dragging sorts it out. They also throw in a grab from the Prime Minister after the second headline, which gets respoken. You voice the witty banter with the Sports Reporter With Eyes Too Close Together and Enthusiastic Weatherperson, changing colour for different speakers. The anchor’s intro to the Thing That Happened gets cued out, and the VT. A few extra words the previous captioner missed get spliced in live as you go. You also voice the last sentence, as you were pressed for time and couldn’t tidy the whole thing. You voice the cross to Reporter Number Six with some breaking developments from the last 10 minutes, and the interview with Academic With A Beard in light of these developments, and on it goes.

Not quite live, not quite scripted, the news calls for hybrid captioning.

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