A news bulletin is a brief radio news broadcast, giving the bare facts of stories before more depth is added in a full programme. Writing a bulletin involves all the normal journalistic skills but also needs to be shaped into a coherent structure which will hold listeners’ attention for its entire length.
The key to a good bulletin is balance, pace and variety. Too many long complicated stories will slow the bulletin down and allow listeners’ attention to drift. Too few stories may mean that listeners miss important details or feel left out.
It is often possible to achieve this by reordering the order of your stories and by adding and removing some items. You should also look at the timings for your stories afresh to see if you can make the bulletin shorter or longer. This is a good time to take a calculator with you when constructing a bulletin to help you work out how long each story will be, as well as helping you to develop your judgement of timings for individual stories.
A good way to vary your bulletin is to use sound bites. These can be a five or 10-second audio clip inserted in a voice report or a stand-alone 20- or 25-second clip. This helps the audience to connect with your stories and can make a long bulletin more interesting, especially in times of emergency. It is also worth taking more copy into the studio than you need for your bulletin in case you misjudged a time or an audio clip does not play.