write a summary of the news bulletin in a paragraph
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All your work as a broadcast journalist leads ultimately to one thing - the time when your listeners hear what you have produced. This can be the news bulletin or a current affairs program. You have to use your on-air time effectively.
Although we will concentrate in this section on producing bulletins for radio, you can use similar techniques for television. The main difference is that television bulletins also include pictures, which have to be coordinated with the script. If you can understand the principles of producing radio bulletins, you can use them for television, adapting them to the style of your particular newsroom.
The principles of bulletin preparation
Radio bulletins are usually made up from three types of material:
written stories in the form of a script;
voice reports from journalists, either recorded or live;
recorded sound called actuality. This is usually the sound of someone speaking, perhaps taken from an interview or a speech. A short segment of actuality is called a grab. Grabs are used in a similar way to quotes in a newspaper story. In some countries, grabs are called cuts or inserts.
Preparing a bulletin should not be difficult if you remember the basic principles of news reporting. Remind yourself of the criteria for what is news: Is it new, unusual, interesting, significant and about people?
Each of these criteria will help you to decide what stories you should include in your bulletin and where you should place them within your five, 10 or 15 minutes. It is usual to give the most important story first and the least important story last. If you are putting together your first bulletin, stick to this technique.
However, once you feel confident that you can put together a simple bulletin, you can start to consider some extra factors which will change it from a list of stories to a proper bulletin.
The two main factors you have to consider are the overall order or balance of the bulletin and the pace of it.
Balance
Try to avoid seeing the bulletin simply as a collection of individual, self-contained stories. If you put a string of economic stories (however important) at the start of the bulletin, you risk losing your listeners' interest.
They expect a balance of items, some heavy and some light, some about major political events and some about ordinary people. Of course, the actual mix of stories, their tone and pace of delivery will depend to a degree on the format of your station; serious national broadcasters tend to use more serious stories, delivered in a more deliberate style whereas youth-oriented music station bulletins might be lighter and brighter with more stories about popular culture.
Whatever your station format, your ranking of stories in order in the bulletin will give your listeners some indication of how important you consider each story. But there is some freedom within bulletins to re-order stories to add variety and balance to the bulletin as a whole.
Pace
You must also get the right pace of stories through your bulletin. By pace we mean the length and tone of a story as it appears to the listeners.
Some stories have a fast pace. The report of a fire, for example, will usually be written in short sentences, using short snappy words to convey simple ideas. It will have a fast pace.
By comparison, a story explaining some involved political controversy may need slightly longer sentences with words expressing more complicated ideas. The story itself may need to be slightly longer. The whole effect is one of a slower pace.
Too many long complicated stories will slow the pace of the whole bulletin and allow the attention of your listeners to wander. Too many short, sharp stories may leave listeners confused, unable to keep up with the pace of changing stories.
Your ideal bulletin will have a steady pace throughout to maintain interest, with variations in pace during certain sections; slower at times to let your listeners catch their breath or faster at other times to pick up their lagging interest.
How do you achieve balance and pace in practice? You should rank your stories in order of importance then look at the order afresh, to see that you have a good balance of items and variations in pace.