ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors consider the theory and practice of constructing a basic news story. Journalists draw a distinction between what they call hard news and soft news. Hard news is the stuff that occupies most of the first few pages of a newspaper, the top items on a website and most of the content of television and radio news bulletins. The distinction between hard and soft news is useful in making an initial assessment of a story and suggesting how it might be approached. In a traditional production process, the story will be written first, and the headline added later once the page has been designed, the location and shape of the story decided and the amount of space for the headline allocated. The main point of the story does not necessarily have to be in the first line of the intro, for example.
