Preparing a news bulletin is not difficult if you follow some practical techniques. The main considerations are the balance of stories and the pace of the bulletin. Too many long complicated stories may leave your audience breathless and too much fast moving news can lose their attention altogether. Try to achieve a balance by ranking your stories and then looking at the order afresh to see whether any need to be moved up or down to create the right pace.
The lead story is the most important and is the one which listeners will judge your bulletin by. Make sure it is the best written and presented story in the bulletin. It should have a strong, dramatic impact. It should grab the audience’s attention and get them listening to the rest of the bulletin.
Sometimes you may have several stories which are of equal importance but the obvious one should be pushed to the top of the bulletin to give it added drama. The other story should be pushed down the bulletin to add variety and to give the audience some breathing space between stories.
Light or funny stories often make good tail-enders as they can be a welcome relief to the heavy stories which may have dominated your bulletin. These should not be ‘teasers’ which give the whole story away, but should be a surprise to the audience. Short sound bites, called actuality grabs, can be a useful addition to your bulletin as they give the audience the chance to hear the voices of people within their community.
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