When preparing a news bulletin, you must aim for balance and pace. Too many long complicated stories will slow down the whole bulletin and cause listeners to lose interest. On the other hand, a ‘bulletin of bulletins’ will leave them confused because it is difficult to keep up with a constant stream of changing stories.
You should try to rank your stories correctly in order of importance, but also look at them afresh from time to time to see if they are all working together well. This will help you avoid problems like having too many short, sharp stories which confuse the audience or having a few long, complex stories which slow the bulletin down.
A short music theme should be used to announce the bulletin and sometimes at other points within it, for example to separate different stories. This is called a’stab’ or’sting’ and can be produced on a computer to save you recording actual voices (although this must still be done for important news stories). Any grabs in languages other than your own should be overdubbed with a translation.
Some stories, such as weather forecasts and traffic updates, are necessary but they are not necessarily of great newsworthiness. Often they are best left to the end of the bulletin, when they can act as a relief or change of pace after a diet of disasters, death and politics. Light or funny stories make good tail-enders and should be written in a more informal way than other stories, perhaps using a play on words which listeners will appreciate.
