news structure

News structure
Journalistic prose is explicit and precise, and tries not to rely on jargon. As a rule, journalists will not use a long word when a short one will do. They use subject-verb-object construction and vivid, active prose. They offer anecdotes, examples and metaphors, and they rarely depend on colorless generalizations or abstract ideas. News writers try to avoid using the same word more than once in a paragraph (sometimes called an "echo" or "word mirror.
Headline
The head of a story, in newsman's jargon. eg. "Pilot flies below bridges to save divers"
Subhead (or dek)
A phrase, sentence or several sentences near the title of an article or story.
Lead or intro
The most important structural element of a story is the lead or "intro" (in the UK) —the story's first, or leading, sentence. (Some American English speakers use the spelling lede (pronounced /ˈliːd/), from the archaic English, used to avoid confusion with the printing press type formerly made from lead or the related typographical term leading.[2]) Charnley (1966) stated that "an effective lead is a "brief, sharp statement of the story's essential facts"" (p. 166). The lead is usually the first sentence, or in some cases the first two sentences, and is ideally 20-25 words in length. The top-loading principle applies especially to leads, but the unreadability of long sentences constrains its size. This makes writing a lead an optimization problem, in which the goal is to articulate the most encompassing and interesting statement that a writer can make in one sentence, given the material with which he or she has to work. While a rule of thumb says the lead should answer most or all of the 5 Ws, few leads can fit all of these.
To "bury the lead" in news style, refers to beginning a description with details of secondary importance to the readers, forcing them to read more deeply into an article than they should have to in order to discover the essential point.
Article leads are sometimes categorized into hard leads and soft leads. A hard lead aims to provide a comprehensive thesis which tells the reader what the article will cover. A soft lead introduces the topic in a more creative, attention-seeking fashion, and is usually followed by a nut graph (a brief summary of facts).
Media critics[who?] often note that the lead can be the most polarizing subject in the article. Often critics accuse the article of bias based on an editor's choice in headline and lead.[citation needed]
Example Lead-and-Summary Design
Humans will be going to the moon again. The NASA announcement came as the agency requested ten trillion dollars of appropriations for the project. ...
Example Soft-Lead Design
NASA is proposing another space project. The agency's budget request, announced today, included a plan to send another person to the moon. This time the agency hopes to establish a long-term facility as a jumping-off point for other space adventures. The budget requests approximately ten gazillion dollars for the project. ...
Two other terms common in editing are hed and dek or deck. Hed is used to denote an article's headline or heading. Dek refers to a quick blurb or article teaser.
Nut graph
One or more paragraphs, particularly in a feature story, that explain the news value of the story.
Inverted pyramid
Journalism instructors usually describe the organization or structure of a news story as an inverted pyramid. The journalist top-loads the essential and most interesting elements of his or her story, with supporting information following in order of diminishing importance.
This structure enables readers to stop reading at any point and still come away with the essence of a story. It allows people to enter a topic to the depth that their curiosity takes them, and without the imposition of details or nuances that they would consider irrelevant, but still making that information available to more interested readers.
The inverted pyramid structure also enables articles to be trimmed to any arbitrary length during layout, to fit in the space available.
Inexperienced writers are often admonished "Don't bury the lead!" to ensure that they present the most important facts first, rather than requiring the reader to go through several paragraphs to find them.
Some writers start their stories with the "1-2-3 lead". This format invariably starts with a 5W opening paragraph (as described above), followed by an indirect quote that serves to support a major element of the first paragraph, and then a direct quote to support the indirect quote.
Feature style
News stories aren't the only type of material that appear in newspapers and magazines. Longer articles, such as magazine cover articles and the pieces that lead the inside sections of a newspaper, are known as features. Feature stories differ from straight news in several ways. Foremost is the absence of a straight-news lead, most of the time. Instead of offering the essence of a story up front, feature writers may attempt to lure readers in.
While straight news stories always stay in third person point of view, it's not uncommon for a feature magazine article to slip into first person. The journalist will often detail his or her interactions with interview subjects, making the piece more personal.
A feature's first paragraphs often relate an intriguing moment or event, as in an "anecdotal lead". From the particulars of a person or episode, its view quickly broadens to generalities about the story's subject.
The section that signals what a feature is about is called the nut graf or billboard. Billboards appear as the third or fourth paragraph from the top, and may be up to two paragraphs long. Unlike a lede, a billboard rarely gives everything away. This reflects the fact that feature writers aim to hold their readers' attention to the end, which requires engendering curiosity and offering a "payoff." Feature paragraphs tend to be longer than those of news stories, with smoother transitions between them. Feature writers use the active-verb construction and concrete explanations of straight news, but often put more personality in their prose.
Feature stories often close with a "kicker" rather than simply petering out.