Story structure-The Inverted Pyramid style /wire service style

The Inverted Pyramid News Story
The inverted pyramid is a favored form for news stories.  This type of news writing form places the main point at the top of the story with the rest of the information in descending order of importance. Inverted Pyramid stories provide a format to convey information in a quick and efficient way.

The Inverted Pyramid news story has become the basic form of

newspaper writing. It is also common in many other kinds of publication, including Web pages.. It  begins with the climax and records all additional information in order of declining importance.This is commonly known as the "Inverted Pyramid" story structure, because the order of precedence of facts can be illustrated as an upside-down pyramid. 

The Five Ws and the H, obviously, should be found in the first few paragraphs of such a story.

The style of writing is also known as the "wire service style," because it was early wire services - used for  transmitted accounts of breaking news from remote locations .

Advantages of Inverted Pyramid format

- It provided a format to convey information in a quick and efficient way.

- It served as an aid to readers who wanted to use the newspaper as an index of the day's news - that is, by scanning the lead sentence, readers could determine if

they wanted to learn more or skip to something they found more relevant.

It allowed, at least on the face of it, a format for providing a dispassionate and unbiased account of events.

- It permitted different publications that might assign differing importance to a given story to conveniently edit any story to a length that suited its priorities.

The inverted pyramid news story has certain limitations. For example, it can sometimes be more confusing than a chronological account of an event - it's the reporter's job to ensure it makes sense. In addition, it is most certainly more difficult to write a clear Inverted Pyramid story than it is to write a chronological story.