The news bulletin is a key part of any radio station’s broadcasting day. Listeners expect a balance of stories – some heavy and some light, some about major events and others about ordinary people. They also expect the right pace for each story. A report of a fire, for example, will usually be written at a very fast pace using short snappy words to convey simple ideas. By contrast, an explanation of a complex political controversy will require longer sentences to express more complicated ideas and will have a slower pace.
Choosing which stories to include in your bulletin is one of the first tasks when writing your script. Once you’ve done that, it is important to write headlines which promote those stories as effectively as possible. You’ll find that if your audience can’t immediately see what the story is about, they may be less inclined to listen.
You need to structure the stories in the order that they appear in your bulletin, arranging them in descending order of importance. This is often known as the Inverted Pyramid method and it’s a good idea to follow this pattern as much as possible.
It’s a good idea to include at least three stories in your bulletin and if there are any other items that you want to run as briefs, do so. If you’re a regular newsreader you should learn to time each story as you write it, adding up the time that it will take to read them. This will soon become a habit and you should be able to look at a piece of copy and estimate within a second how long it will take to read.
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