The shape of the news story

Here we will introduce the concept of the inverted pyramid, which is the basic shape of the news story. We see why this is a good way to present news.

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News stories go straight to the point. In this respect, they are quite unlike other forms of written English, such as novels and short stories, committee reports, letters and theses. All these are written primarily for people with the time to consider and absorb what has been written.

They also follow the usual pattern of spoken language, in which it is generally impolite to jump straight to the main point which you wish to make without first establishing contact.
For example, a female student writing home may say:

"Dear Mum and Dad, I don't want you to worry about me, but I have some news for you which you are not going to like. I met a boy here at the start of the semester and he likes me a lot. Well, we have been seeing a lot of each other and ..."

What she is not likely to write home is:

"Dear Mum and Dad, I am pregnant."

But news stories do that; that is why they are different.

In the following example, you will see that the narrative form starts at the oldest part of the story, then tells what happened in the order in which it happened. The news form starts at the most newsworthy part of the story, then fills in details with the most newsworthy first and the least newsworthy last:

The reader knows the outcome of the drama in the first sentence of the news story. The background information about how it happened, and why it happened, are filled in later in the story.

Top priority

News stories are written in a way which sets out clearly what is the top priority news, what is the next most newsworthy, and so on. This makes it easier for readers and listeners to understand.

In many societies, people read newspapers and web pages in a hurry. They probably do not read every word, but skim quickly through, reading headlines and intros to see which stories interest them. Some which seem at first glance to be interesting may seem less interesting after a few paragraphs, and so the reader moves on.

In other societies, people may find reading a newspaper hard work. This may be because it is written in a language which is not their first language; or it may be because they are not good at reading. They, too, will look at headlines and intros to decide which stories are interesting enough to be worth the effort of reading them.

In either case, the readers will generally read less than half of most stories; there are very few stories indeed of which they will read every word.

Similarly, people do not listen intently to every word of a radio or television news bulletin. Unless the first sentence of each item interests them, they allow their minds to wander until they hear something that interests them.

The way a news story is written therefore has to do two things:

• It has to sell the story to the casual reader or listener.
• It has to give the main point of the story very quickly, so that even if the reader moves on after one or two paragraphs, or if the listener stops listening after the first sentence or two, they will still have a fair idea of what the story was about.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 761