Why is one of them pointing UP?

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Really, one of the best parts is the absolute top notch writing in the story. It reminds me of the papers I used to write in middle school, quoting some encyclopedia and then "paraphrasing" it in the paragraph below.

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Yeah, I'm constantly amazed at how bad the writing is in "news" articles. I understand that sometimes it's just stylistic tradition -- the way they write things so that "breaking" news can be inserted in old copy as paragraph #2 without changing the rest -- but mostly it's just incompetent.

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Have to say, I particularly liked this para:

"The actress's protruding nipples were removed from the posters after producers feared they could prove offensive and spark a string of complaints."

I'm pretty sure it used work the other way around - putting in nipples to attract attention.

Also, agreed on the standard of news copy - stock behaviour for printed tabloids (usually the only sort of newspaper lying around in my local pub) seems to be to cram the bulk of the story into paragraph one, then use each subsequent paragraph to reiterate (note, not necessarily expand on) chunks of paragraph one. While I can see why you might end up with something like this in an online site, there's really no excuse for it in print.

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Well, it actually makes more sense in print, since there are word limits in print that have no justification online. Here's one description of the hidious Inverted Pyramid style. One detail that link omits is that "writing in this rigid fashion will make you sound like a retard. Or Hemingway." Up next: weather and sports!

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Hmm, fair enough. I guess the tabloids just take the inverted pyramid to the extreme.

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Certainly inverted pyramid is not the best style for, well, most everything, but doesn't it seem the best way to present an article in a newspaper? Given that most people scan the paper to find things that interest them, only stopping occasionally, doesn't it make sense to give you the brunt of the information right at the front? The reader can then immediately decide whether or not he wants further information, read on if he does, or skip to the next article if not. It even allows you to read part of the article to get as deep as you want and then skip on.

And it does make you sound like someone with no train of thought, but newspapers aren't meant to be literature, they're meant to convey pure information (nominally) in as terse a manner as possible. Few people read fast enough or have enough time in the morning to read even the A section of their daily papers, what with the two-hour commutes and so on.

Of course, it doesn't inherently follow that that's the way to write a story on an internet news site, as the formats are quite different, providing more space for headlines and often even a summary before you get to the article at all. In other words, the folding that the web provides is emulated by using the inverted pyramid. But idiot ``journalists'' were taught in school that that's the way to write an article, and they don't have the balls or the insight to question why. Or they've already had to rewrite too many because of their editor with that mindset. (Of course, that assumes that there are really editors on these sites.) But that's no reason to dismiss it altogether. It has its (ever-diminishing) place.

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they're never "freakishly misplaced" as long as they're in your mouth :p

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