News style

News style or news writing is the prose style of short, front-page newspaper stories and the news bulletins that air on radio and television. It encompasses not only vocabulary and sentence structure, but the order in which stories present information, their tone and the readers or interests to which they cater. This structure is called the inverted pyramid.

Related Topics:
Newspaper - News - Radio - Television - Inverted pyramid

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Specifically, 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. They attempt to answer all the 5 Ws: Who? What? When? Where? and Why? The point is not comprehensiveness per se, but to satisfy reader curiosity. Journalists try to anticipate readers' likely questions and answer them.

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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 extends to the use of adjectives, euphemisms, and idioms. Papers with an international audience for example, usually use a more formal style of writing.

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