To write a good news article, you must have both “spirit and form”. If you want to write this kind of article quickly, you must be fully familiar with the format layout and content arrangement: from the content point of view, the article should be packaged as a standard news article as much as possible; from the format point of view, it should also meet the requirements of news media for publication.
1. Content requirements
The “5W1H” elements must be possessed by news articles, including Who, When, What, Where, Why, and How.
In addition, news articles should also have five attributes: timeliness, significance, proximity, authenticity, and fun. Among them, timeliness requires that the event must have occurred recently, significance requires that the content has obvious observable characteristics, proximity means that it must be closely related to the lives of most readers, authenticity means that the event itself must have actually happened, and fun mainly refers to the entertainment function that the news itself can bring. These five characteristics do not need to be comprehensive, but timeliness is the most basic and should be reflected in the content as much as possible.
2. Content composition
(1) News title: It should be highly summarized and eye-catching.
(2) News introduction: It should indicate the important facts described in the overall news and be clear at a glance.
(3) News body: It is the main body of the news, focusing on the time, elaborating the problem, and expressing the viewpoint. Marketing content should also be interspersed in this part.
(4) News background: In combination with the characteristics of marketing content, introduce the historical background, current environment and conditions of the news. Generally, only a brief introduction is needed and it should not dominate the main content.
(5) News conclusion: If necessary, the last sentence or paragraph can be used to summarize.
3. News structure
News structure is the overall design of the layout of news works. Common text structures are as follows.
(1) Pyramid. Arrange facts in chronological order, with the first one at the front and the later one at the back; the beginning of the event is the beginning of the news, and the end of the event is the end of the news.
(2) Inverted pyramid. Put the most important and exciting content at the front. The subsequent parts are narrated in chronological order.
(3) Diamond. This is a “small at both ends and large in the middle” structure. The introduction introduces the content. The main content is relatively complex and can be narrated in sections. The article ends with a conclusion.
(4) Radiation. With a central event or thing as the core content, radiate other facts. It is suitable for reporting relatively scattered events. For example, a news article on a medical and health website uses “Marathon under haze weather” as the central event and radiates news about health care services.
(5) Parallel. Many main facts are listed in parallel in the content, and then summarized and prompted with an introduction. The marketing content is hidden among the many main facts.