THE STRAIGHT NEWS STORY

LEARNING OBJECTIVE: Outline the various parts of the straight news story.

The major difference in style between newswriting English and literary English was discussed earlier in this chapter. There is also a big difference in structure between the literary piece and a newspaper story.

Journalism and architecture have more in common than what is evident at first glance. While the designing and planning of a building is far more complicated than the construction of a news story, both are the same in principle. In each case, space is a prime element.

An architect uses bricks, cement and other materials; a newswriter uses words as his bricks and cement. If the building lacks design and careful construction, it will collapse; if the news story is not carefully planned, it will only serve to confuse the reader and discredit the publication in which it appears.

Figure 2-3. - Inverted pyramid news story structure.

Before you can present the facts, you first must understand them, appraise them correctly and organize them in an orderly and easily understood manner. This process of organization and selection begins when you set out on an assignment. You rarely will be able to-get your facts in the order in which they will appear in the final story. The process of legible note-taking provides the raw material for you to construct the story, and certain proven guidelines serve as the blueprint for building the final product.

In fiction, a short story or novel is normally constructed in chronological order. This means the author starts from the beginning, sets the time and place, describes the scene, introduces his characters, then slowly weaves the threads of his plots and subplots until a climax is reached, usually near the end of the story. The writer deliberately holds back the climax to build suspense and to make sure the reader reads the entire story.

Most news stories, however, are constructed in just the opposite fashion. The climax is presented first. This method packs the most important facts together with the barest necessary explanatory material into the first paragraph (the summary lead), then moves into the

detailed portion of the story (the body) by covering the facts in diminishing order of importance. This form of newswriting is commonly known as the inverted pyramid style because when it is diagramed, it appears as an upside-down pyramid (fig. 2-3).