A 30-Second Radio Spot and a 45-Second Reel

Rae Dunmore's polemic ran on July 8. A citizens' group called Fennick Neighbors for Open Bids read it and asked to adapt it. They wanted a radio spot on the county's one AM station and a reel for their page, both pushing people to the July 14 meeting. Rae agreed to write the scripts, as long as every fact stayed tied to the evidence table.

Two formats, two senses. Radio has no pictures. A reel often has no sound. Each version has to stand on its own.

The radio spot: 30 seconds

The module on Video and Radio Ad Development puts natural read speed at about 130 to 150 words a minute. Thirty seconds, minus a sponsor tag and a breath, leaves room for 65 to 75 words. That is one fact, one contrast and one ask. Not two asks. One.

Numbers are hard to hear. A listener in a truck will catch "forty-one thousand" and "four hundred eighteen thousand" if you say them slowly and only once each. Six figures in a row and they hear static. So Rae dropped the 2.3 miles, the dates and the family tie. The family tie is the juiciest fact in the whole file, and it needs context a spot cannot give. It belongs in the article.

FENNICK NEIGHBORS FOR OPEN BIDS   :30   "Four Hundred Feet"

SFX:    Gravel under tires. Truck slows, stops.      (0:00 to 0:02)
MAN:    Four hundred feet of Cutler Bench Road        (0:02)
        washed out in May.
WOMAN:  Fixing it cost forty-one thousand dollars.
MAN:    So the county declared an emergency...
WOMAN:  ...and handed out a four hundred
        eighteen thousand dollar contract.
        No bids.
MAN:    State law says jobs that size get
        sealed bids.
WOMAN:  July fourteenth, nine a.m.,
        county commission. Ask them to rebid it.
MAN:    Fennick Ledger dot com has the records.     (0:25)
TAG:    Paid for by Fennick Neighbors               (0:26 to 0:30)
        for Open Bids.

Words, including tag: 70

A few choices worth copying:

• Cold open. A two-second gravel sound, then a fact. No "Attention Fennick County residents."
• Two voices trade lines. The handoff on "emergency... and handed out" pulls the listener across the turn where the story flips.
• "Sealed bids" is the only legal term. Listeners do not need the statute number. The website has it.
• The date is said as words. "July fourteenth, nine a.m." reads better aloud than "7/14 at 9."

The sponsor tag

Under the FCC's sponsorship identification rule, 47 CFR 73.1212, a station has to announce who paid for a broadcast. When a group pays for material on a political matter or a controversial issue of public importance, the station also has to get a list of the group's chief officers or board members and keep it in its public file for two years. The station handles that file, but expect them to ask you for the list. The tag in Rae's script names the true sponsor, the group, and not an ad agency or a volunteer who wrote the check.

This spot is about a county decision, not a candidate or a ballot measure, so state campaign disclaimer rules do not come into play here. If your spot names a candidate or a measure on an upcoming ballot, check your state's campaign finance law and the FCC political broadcasting rules first. The module on Video and Radio Ad Development covers both.

Producing it

Rae built the read in Dialogue Editor, which handles multi-voice scripts with ElevenLabs voices, so she could hear the timing before booking real voices. Her first draft ran 34 seconds. It had "the Fennick County Commission" where the final says "the county," and a second line about the 2.3 miles. Both went. She kept the slow read on "four hundred eighteen thousand," because that number is the whole spot. The version above times out at 29.6 seconds with the tag.

The group used two volunteers for the final, recorded in a closet full of coats. Rae cleaned it up in SoundStudio: trimmed breaths, added the gravel effect under the open, and checked levels. The module on Audio Editing and Production covers the cleanup. For delivery, ask the station for its file spec and loudness target before you export. Stations differ, and guessing wastes a round trip. StudioConverter can convert the file and set loudness once you know the target.

The reel: 45 seconds

The reel flips every radio rule. Pictures carry it, and text does the talking because a lot of people scroll muted. Voiceover is a bonus layer for those with sound on. As of October 2026, YouTube's help center says Shorts can run up to 3 minutes. Instagram's help center pages checked for this lesson did not state a length, so check the limit in the app before you plan anything over a minute. Forty-five seconds is well under either.

Frame: vertical 9:16, exported at 1080x1920. Keep text in the middle of the frame. The bottom fifth gets covered by captions and the username, and the right edge by the like and share buttons.

Steal from that list. The first three seconds show something happening, a tire meeting a barricade, before any text explains it. And the document close-ups are real pages from the records, shot with a phone, with a finger pointing at the line. Viewers trust a page they can almost read more than any graphic.

Trowbridge's quote goes in the reel too, as on-screen text with his name: "That road was going to kill somebody." Fairness does not stop at the article. If you put a person's decision in a video, put their explanation there as well.

Cutting it

Rae shot everything on a phone in one afternoon and cut it in VideoStudio. She burned the on-screen text into the picture and added a caption track for the voiceover too. WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 1.2.2 calls for captions on prerecorded video with audio, and burned-in text alone does not cover every word spoken. The modules on Video Production and on Video and Reels for Social Media cover framing and captions in detail. She exported once, then ran the file through StudioConverter to get it under the group's upload size without visible damage.

The final check was the same as the radio test, flipped. She watched it on her phone with the sound off. Every number landed. The ask was readable. Done.