Better Broadcast Writing, Better Broadcast News teaches students how to write with the conversational simplicity required for radio and TV. This text draws on the Emmy Award-winning author's decades of professional experience in broadcast journalism. In addition to writing, the text also discusses the other elements that make up a good story--producing, reporting, shooting, editing, and ethics. The author's real-world perspective conveys the excitement of a career in journalism.
Greg Dobbs worked at ABC News for 23 years, first as a producer, then for most of his career as a correspondent, including ten years overseas. He covered major domestic and foreign stories including the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the first Gulf War, the revolution and then the occupation of the US embassy in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Solidarity movement and martial law in Poland, the civil war in and the ejection of the PLO from Beirut, the Iran-Iraq war, and the civil war and deaths of IRA hunger-strikers in Northern Ireland.
Dobbs won two national Emmy Awards in the process, the first for "Best Spot News Coverage on a Network" for coverage of a terrible earthquake in Italy in 1980, the other for "Best Network Documentary" in 1989 for a documentary on the environmental poisoning of America. He also received the "Distinguished Service Award" from the Society of Professional Journalists.
When ABC asked him in 1992 to move from his home in Colorado's Rocky Mountains to New York City, it took him approximately one nanosecond to say no. That led to a second career as a radio talk show host, a newspaper opinion columnist, and the television moderator of an Emmy Award winning discussion program on Rocky Mountain PBS.
In 2003, Dobbs returned to the road as a correspondent for the all high-definition television network HDNet. It put him back on airplanes, reporting documentaries for the program World Report from around the country and around the world. He has produced and reported segments for World Report about Agent Orange in Vietnam, terrorism in Lebanon, politics in Russia, the post-Apartheid era in South Africa, wealth in Dubai, autocracy in Venezuela, assisted suicide in Switzerland, free trade coffee in Nicaragua, dirty water in Indonesia, post-war recovery in Liberia, cocaine in Bolivia, assisted suicide in Switzerland, and PTSD in the U.S. military, among many others. He has also reported extensively from Israel and the Palestinian territories.
In total, Dobbs has reported from 49 states and more than 80 countries.
He also is the author of a university-level textbook on writing for broadcasting. It is called Better Broadcast Writing, Better Broadcast News .
