Quick Guide to Radio Speaking Competition

Radio is not currently a supplemental event for NSDA.  Students competing in this event will earn points as if they competed in a Drama Event, i.e. 5 pts for 1st, 4pts for 2nd, etc per each round.

All competitors must perform their broadcast live with cameras OFF both for the judges and the competitors.  The news in the broadcast must be current to within 48 hours of the broadcast, some leeway is given for sports scores, i.e. Sunday scores may be presented in a Tuesday competition.

Timing

Students must prepare a 5 minute Radio Broadcast which will be performed LIVE with cameras turned off.  A grace period of 5 seconds will be given.  If students are outside the grace period they CAN NOT be ranked higher than a student within the grace period (even if their broadcast is better)

Radio Broadcast Content:

Broadcast must include at least one CURRENT (past 48 hours) story for each of the following:

  • Intro with call letters

  • International News

  • National News

  • Local News

  • Commercial

  • Weather

  • Feature/Entertainment (optional)

  • Traffic (optional)

  • Sports

  • Outro

Judging Criteria:

Quality of stories:

  • Are stories interesting? 

  • Are stories the right length or are they too long? Does is seem student wrote a story or just copied it off the web?

  • Do stories provide you enough information as a news report?

  • Is the commercial interesting/funny and well delivered for the subject matter?

Timeliness and Structure and Content

  • Is the entire broadcast 5 minutes (+/- 5 seconds)? If outside of the grace period a student can’t be ranked higher than someone within the graceperiod.

  • Does the newscast have a good intro/outro?

  • Does the newscast have International, National, Local, Commercial, Weather and Sports? If one of the elements is missing, a student can’t be ranked higher than someone with a story in each category.

Delivery, Verbal and Non-Verbal Skills

  • Pronunciation/Enunciation: can you understand everything the speaker says?

  • Projection: is the speaker's voice well projected? 

  • Vocal dramatics: does the speaker have modularity in their voice and is the voice appropriate for the topic, i.e. sad story sounds sad and happy story sounds happy?

  • Pacing /Pauses - does the speaker use proper pauses and pacing?