There are many ways to place trades around news time. I will describe three of the most common, each based on a different time to place the trade:

Placing pending orders each way is called a straddle. People who do this usually place the pending orders about 3-5 minutes before the news is released. Stops and targets will vary quite a bit depending on the nature of the news report. The advantage of a straddle is that if there is solid movement in one direction, only one order triggers and (if the movement is far enough) your order closes with a nice profit. The risk of a straddle is that widening spreads and erratic price action can stop out in both orders.

You can try to get the news information and place a trade before most of the market has a chance to react. This is called spike trading. To do this, you need a fast internet connection, a way to get the news very quickly, and (if possible) a way to automatically place the trade depending on if the news deviation is big enough and in what direction the deviation is. There are companies you can buy news feeds from. There are several autoclicker software packages out there that can be used to partially or fully automate placing the trades.

The third common way to trade the news is to wait for the initial spike to happen, then try to catch price movement back towards the pre-news price (price action back towards the pre-news price is called retrace). Learning to trade the retrace is something you can do by watching and demo trading (do NOT trade real money while learning to do this) over a period of time. Also, many trading rooms such as Forex Diamonds try to trade the post-spike retrace.

Source; http://olisasegun..com.ng/2008/06/ways-to-trade-forex-during-important.html