A news bulletin is a short summary of important stories in the current news. A good news bulletin is balanced, has a variety of items and has a varied pace, slower at times to allow listeners to catch their breath, faster at other times to pick up lagging interest. It includes a mix of hard and soft news stories, human interest and amusing ephemera. The actual mix will depend to a degree on the type of station; serious national radio stations tend to use more serious stories and present them in a deliberate style, whilst youth-oriented music stations will have a lighter mix with more stories about popular culture.
To help balance the number of stories and to keep the pace of the bulletin up, it’s often useful to combine news stories on similar subjects. This can be done either by running them as one story or by linking them with words such as ‘Meanwhile’ or ‘Still on the subject of ‘.
Similarly, it is sometimes helpful to include briefs at the end of the bulletin. These are shorter stories, designed to increase the pace of the bulletin if it is becoming slow and boring for the audience.
Another good idea is to rank the stories in order of importance before you start constructing the bulletin, this will give you an indication of how long you’re going to spend on each item. It’s also useful to know your (or the newsreader’s) reading rate; this is how long it takes them to read a line of text. Once you know this it’s very easy to time the bulletin, writing the time of each story on a piece of paper.