Broadcast Rundown Template

A broadcast rundown is the running order of a television show with a duration on every line. It's written in the newsroom during the day and called from the control room at air. Producers build it, the director calls off it, the technical director and the audio operator work from the notes attached to each row, and the anchors read a script that is keyed to the same numbering.

One document, several audiences. The producer cares about total running time against the slot. The director cares about what's next and where it comes from. The anchor cares about which story they own and how long it is. That's why the format is fixed and boring on purpose: everybody has to find their own information on a page they're scanning in a hurry, often in a dark gallery, often while somebody is talking in their ear.

It's also a live document. Stories drop, live shots fail, a guest runs long, and the rundown gets rebuilt between blocks. What matters is that the times downstream are always right the moment something changes. For other formats, see the run of show and rundown template hub.

A full half hour

A local newscast, "News at Six," on air at 18:00:00 with a hard out at 18:30:00. Three blocks, three breaks, weather in the middle, sport in the back. Durations are mm:ss. Start times are calculated from the durations above them, never typed.

The three breaks take 6:30 of the half hour. Everything else adds up to 23:30, and the rows actually marked Content, the editorial material, come to 22:05. The rest is titles, bumpers and the promo. That 22:05 is about what a local half hour has historically carried, though in plenty of markets the number is lower now. Whatever your station's number is, it's fixed before you start writing, and the rundown exists to show you when you've exceeded it.

The block structure

A newscast runs in three or four self-contained blocks with breaks between them, and each block has its own shape. Blocks are lettered from the top: A block, B block, C block, and a D block on a longer show.

The A block is the news. It opens with the lead story, the one that justifies the newscast, and works down through the rest in descending order of importance. In the example that's rows 4 to 6, running 18:01:30 to 18:08:55. The lead gets 3:20 because it carries a live shot and a package. Story 3 gets 1:50 because it's the third most important thing that happened, not because 1:50 is a natural length. The A block earns the most time and holds the audience through the first break.

The B block is regional news, features, and weather. It runs from 18:11:40 to 18:20:00. Weather is a scheduled destination, not a story: it's teased before the first break at row 7, promised again in the block, and lands at 18:16:40. Viewers stay through a break for weather in a way they won't for a feature package, which is why the tease sits where it does.

The C block is sport and the kicker. It runs from 18:22:30 to 18:26:50. This is the back half of the show and it's where the flexible material lives. The kicker at row 15 is the light story at the end, and it's deliberately the least important 1:25 in the rundown.

After the last break comes the close: the tomorrow tease, goodnights, credits. Rows 17 to 19 run 1:40 total and they're effectively fixed, because the credits have to land on the second and the tease is a cut promo with a real duration.

The thing that makes this structure work is that breaks do not move. They're sold. Somebody has bought 18:09:10 and the traffic system has logged it. The break is a wall, not a segment, and the content either side floats to fit against it. Every timing decision in a newscast follows from that one fact. In Runsheet, marking a row as a break is what tells the rest of the document, and the person reading it at speed, that this row isn't available to cut. See Segments and Timing for how segment types work.

When the show runs heavy

You cut from content. You never cut from a break. That rule isn't negotiable and it's the reason the rundown separates the two in the first place. So the only real question is which content row gives, and the answer is driven by where the next fixed point sits.

Work the concrete case. The lead story is planned at 3:20, but the live shot comes in long and the segment actually runs 4:00. That's 40 seconds you didn't have. Break 1 is at 18:09:10 and it isn't moving. The A block has rows 5, 6 and 7 left between the lead and that break, and between them they now have to give back 40 seconds.

You take it from the back of the block. Story 3 at row 6 is the last editorial item before the break, so it's the first thing you touch: drop the soundbite and run it as a reader, and 1:50 becomes 1:10. That's the whole 40 seconds in one edit, and it costs you the least important story in the block. If story 3 can't lose that much, you take 20 from story 2 and 20 from story 3 and you tell both anchors in the break before. What you don't do is touch the weather tease at row 7. It's only 0:15, it won't solve the problem on its own, and it's the thing keeping the audience through the break you're protecting.

Now the other case: the show is heavy at the back end instead of inside a block. The kicker goes first. Row 15 is 1:25 of light story sitting directly against Break 3 at 18:26:50, and it exists partly to be dropped. Kill it outright and you recover 1:25. Trim it to 0:45 and you recover 0:40. The close at rows 17 to 19 stays intact either way, because credits landing early looks worse than a show without a kicker.

The pattern is the same in both cases. The rows that give are the ones sitting against a fixed point, because that's where the arithmetic actually has to balance. Decide the order before you go on air. A cut list written at 16:00 takes seconds to execute at 18:07. Written at 18:07, it takes longer than you have, and shows cut the wrong thing. When you're running the show, Runsheet's live tracking holds the delta against your hard out on screen so you know how deep the hole is before you decide what fills it.

What each column is for

• # is the row number, and in a newsroom it's also how the show gets talked about. "Kill 15" is a complete instruction. Move a story and everything below renumbers and recalculates.
• Start is on-air clock time and it's computed, never typed. Row one gets the show start. Every other row starts when the row above it ends. Hand-typed start times survive exactly one change and then quietly lie to you for the rest of the show.
• Segment is the slug. Keep it short and keep it the same as what is on the script and in the playback system, because the director is matching those three things under time pressure. "A Block: Lead Story" works. "Story about the council" doesn't.
• Type is what makes the cut decision fast. Break is fixed and sold. Promo is usually a cut piece with an exact duration. Bumper is short and structural. Content is the only thing that floats, and marking it that way is what lets you see at a glance which rows are actually available at 18:07.
• Duration is planned running time, and in a newscast most of it is known rather than estimated. A package is whatever the editor cut it to. A reader is timed off the script. The variable rows are the live shots and the anchor chat, which is exactly why the numbers around them need to be real.
• Notes, not shown in the table above, is the column the control room actually reads. Source and playback, live window or full screen, which mic is open, who is at the desk and who is at the weather wall, what the audio operator needs ready before the row starts. On row 4 of this example, the note that matters is checking the reporter's IFB during the break before, not after the anchor has tossed to them.

Open this rundown in the app

A rundown in a word processor or a spreadsheet stops being true the moment a duration changes. Every start time below it is now wrong, and you're the one recalculating them, usually while somebody is asking you how you are for time. Runsheet does that part. Set durations, drag to reorder, and every downstream time updates as you edit.

Open this newscast in Runsheet →

That link builds the exact rundown above, all 19 rows with their durations and production notes, ready to edit into your own show. No account, no install. From there you can print it landscape for the control room or export it as CSV or JSON, and run it live with a segment timer and backtime against your hard out.