News style (also journalistic style or news writing style) 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 - who, what, when, where and why (the Five Ws) and also often how - at the opening of the article. This form of structure is sometimes called the "inverted pyramid", to refer to the decreasing importance of information in subsequent paragraphs.
News stories also contain at least one of the following important characteristics relative to the intended audience: proximity, prominence, timeliness, human interest, oddity, or consequence.
Read more about News Style: Overview, Terms and Structure, Feature Style, Other Countries
Famous quotes containing the words news and/or style:
“Word of gloom from the war, one day;
Johnston pressed at the front, they say.
Little Giffen was up and away;
A tear—his first—as he bade good-by,
Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye.
“I’ll write, if spared!” There was news of the fight;
But none of Giffen.—He did not write.”
—Francis Orrery Ticknor (1822–1874)
“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)