News Style

News style (also journalistic style or news writing) is the prose style used for news reporting in media such as newspapers, radio and television. News style encompasses not only vocabulary and sentence structure, but also the way in which stories present the information in terms of relative importance, tone, and intended audience.
News writing attempts to answer all the basic questions about any particular event - the Five Ws - at the opening of the article. This form of structure is sometimes called the "inverted pyramid," to refer to the decreased importance of information as it progresses.
News stories also contain at least one of the following important characteristics: proximity, prominence, timeliness, human interest, oddity, or consequence.
Newspapers generally adhere to an expository writing mode and style, but over time and place journalism ethics and standards have varied in the degree of objectivity and sensationalism incorporated. There are debated definitions of professionalism among particular news agencies, and their reputability or public value, according to professional standards of idealism and depending on what the reader wants from a news story, may be tied to their appearance of objectivity. In its most ideal form, news writing strives to be intelligible to the vast majority of potential readers, as well as to be engaging and succinct. Within the limits created by these goals, news stories also aim for a kind of comprehensiveness. However, other factors are involved, some of which are practical and derived from the media form, and others stylistic.
Among the larger and more respected newspapers, fairness and balance is a major factor for the presentation of information. Commentary is usually confined to a separate section, though each paper may have a different overall slant. Editorial policy dictates the use of adjectives, euphemisms, and idioms. Papers with an international audience, for example, usually use a more formal style of writing.
The specific choices made by a news outlet's editor or editorial board are often collected in a style guide or stylebook; common commercial stylebooks are the "AP Style Manual" and the "US News Style Book". The main goals of news writing can be summarized by the ABCs of journalism: accuracy, brevity, and clarity.