Lesson 12 — Activity 2: The Structure of a News Story

Now that we know something about how different stories make the news, we will look at how journalists or reporters organize the information in their stories to catch our interest and to answer the questions we need to get the main point of the article. Sometimes we refer to these as the 5Ws and 1H.

Image courtesy of www.pixabay.com

The structure that journalists often use to include this information is sometimes called an inverted pyramid (a triangle that is upside down). In this format, the writer starts with the most important information and continues the story with information that is increasingly less important. In other words, if we read the first part of the story, we will have a good idea of what it is about; if we read right to the end, we will know all of the details, too. The first sentence of an article is also called a lead, because the writer hopes it will be interesting enough to lead the reader to continue reading the story.

Here are some other elements of newspaper or magazine articles that you might be familiar with.

Headline: The title of the article that catches the reader's attention.

By-line: The name at the start of the article that shows who wrote the article. The place where the article was written may also be included. This is sometimes called the place line.

Pictures: Illustrations of the article including captions that briefly describe the picture and photo credits that show who took the picture.

Lead Sentence: The sentence that introduces the main idea of the story.

While these features are quite common when news is reported in print formats, the same ideas are used online and in television and radio reports. You may find that there is less detail included in TV or radio news, as if the bottom of the inverted pyramid was cut off!