Pyramid journalism story construction

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. In this module we take a high-level look at the principles of pyramid journalism as explained in The News Manual.

Pyramid journalism


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.

In this module we take a high-level look at the principles of pyramid journalism as explained in The News Manual.

The inverted pyramid

Use the inverted pyramid style of newswriting to give your readers or listeners the most important facts first.

The basic shape of the news story is the inverted pyramid. This means that the most newsworthy key point comes first in the story, in the intro. This is followed by the other key points, in descending order of newsworthiness, so that the main detail comes first and the minor detail last.

Chronological order

If you need to tell part of the story in the order in which events happened, use chronological order after the opening paragraph - the intro - or first few paragraphs. This is an especially useful way of telling stories about sequences of events, rather than single events.

Pyramid of pyramids

If a story is complex with lots of different sections, speakers or issues, use the pyramid of pyramids style. In these cases when a story has a number of different parts to it, it is better to tell the story one part at a time than to jump backwards and forwards between the different parts.

This means that you go to the end of one part, telling the minor details about that, before moving on to the major details of the next part.

This story structure is a pyramid of pyramids, in which each part of the story is told in a mini-inverted pyramid of its own. The sequence of these mini-pyramids will depend upon the newsworthiness of each one. The most newsworthy part of the story will come first, followed by the other parts in decreasing order of importance.


The News Manual
This article is reproduced with the permission of The News Manual - a professional resource for journalists and the media by Henshall and Ingram. This site is taking sharing training resources with The News Manual to ensure the resources have the widest audience.

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