[cityprod]

Except I ONLY heard this on the World Service bulletins, it WASN'T on the BBC website, I didn't see it or hear it anywhere else.  It's not a "single source", it's different products on different stations.  Something gets diluted when it gets watered down.  Tell me how you are not watering down the whole BBC News brand by requiring it to carry many different products that all need to do different things for different audiences.

What story is this exactly? What possible story is significant enough to get included in the short BBC World Service bulletins but not significant enough to get reported on any other BBC News programme or online?

You are right that something gets diluted when it gets watered down. In branding this is when you start adding too many other brands to your masterbrand and so your masterbrand gets drowned out - such as when people start referring to BBC News on the BBC World Service as simply the 'World Service' or BBC News 24 as 'News 24'. That is brand dilution as the core brand - BBC or BBC News - has been washed out.

BBC News does provide programming for different audiences that does different things. But when it does this, they are marketed as different things (e.g. BBC Newsnight, BBC Politics Live, etc.) to distinguish themselves from the standard BBC News brand which is used for straight news. When they are delivering straight news - regardless of whether it is a TV bulletin, TV rolling news, Radio bulletin, online article or on social media - it's packaged simply as BBC News as that is the product they are delivering - the news from the BBC. It's the same news provided by the same BBC News correspondents just on a different medium.

The story was about how 10,000 police in Afghanistan were beginning literacy training.  The whole thing was no more than about 3 or 4 sentences at most, no actuality, nothing.  Pure copy story.  Went looking it up, found absolutely nothing about it anywhere else, in or outside of BBC News.  Was completely baffled why this story had made the bulletins, but wasn't being reported anywhere else. 

I don't get why you think BBC News is a "masterbrand".  BBC is the masterbrand.   BBC News is a sub-brand of the BBC.  And I don't think it should be required to carry the weight of news broadcasting on Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, Radio 5 Live, Radio 6 Music, BBC Local & Regional Radio, BBC World Service and all the other external services, BBC One, BBC Three, BBC News Channel, BBC World News and all the other external TV services.  That's diluting the brand and doing it in such a way as to make the brand seem stretched pretty thin. 

This is why you use sub brands, such as BBC World Service News, BBC Radio News, BBC News 24 and so on, to help carry the load, especially where it makes sense because of the vagaries of the product.  BBC World Service News is very different to BBC News on local radio, so separating that into its own sub brand makes sense.  Same for the news channels.  24 hour rolling news is a very different beast to the roundups on BBC1, so why should the same brand be required to carry those very differing loads?   No, use separate channel brands, like BBC News 24, BBC World News, rather than lazily require BBC News to be all things to all audiences at all times, that just doesn't work.