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I have a question about what the different parts of a newspaper article are called:

Qestion 1: Am I right in thinking that the "title" (A in the illustration below) is called heading, and that the main part of the running text (C in the illustration below) is called body?

Question 2: What is the introductory part (B in the illustration below) called?

Illustration (beginning of article taken from National Geographic Magazine):

A.The Alps’ magical ice caves risk vanishing in our warming world

B. For centuries, this spectacular underworld recorded the local climate and entranced visitors. Now its fairy-tale features are receding, drip by drip.

C. As a child, Karoline Zanker had a magical playground. From her home in the quaint Austrian village of Sankt Martin bei Lofer, near Salzburg, she’d hike past a little pilgrimage church and up into the Lofer Mountains, just below the tree line where even hardy larches cease to grow. At an altitude of about 5,200 feet, under the lofty peaks, she’d slip through a narrow portal in the limestone and crawl right inside the mountain. Prax ice cave, she says, was just like a fairy tale. ...

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  • Your link wants money.
    – BillOnne
    Sep 22, 2022 at 22:57
  • @BillOnne Oh – does it??? So weird, when I click on the link it just takes me to the article... I'm not sure what to do about this since I feel I have to specify the source?
    – Helen
    Sep 23, 2022 at 15:44

1 Answer 1

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This question asks about newspaper articles, but gives an example that is a magazine article. Newspaper articles are normally written in a style that's quite different from magazine articles.


Newspaper articles don't have "title"s or "headings".

A traditional newspaper article is formatted like this:

  • Headline (click bait title).
  • Byline (optional author and/or publication and/or date).
  • Lead (who, what, when, where, how, and sometimes why).
  • Nutgraph (essential background details in one nutshell paragraph).
  • Story (rest of story)

"Lead" (rhymes with "feed") is also spelled "lede" in order to distinguish it from the metal used by the typesetters (rhymes with "fed").

To "bury the lede" is to delay an essential detail until later in the article. This is considered a bad thing to do. (E.g. report JFK's visit to Dallas and don't mention what happened in Dealey Plaza until near the end.)

The story is written to be comprehensible after being cut off at any point between paragraphs. (E.g. I write a story that's printed on a 1-column strip of paper 12 inches long and the editor has an 8 inch space on one page: snip goes the last 4 inches or so).

An additional benefit is that readers can immediately get the important information, and choose to stop reading at any point without fear of missing anything significant.

Newspapers are no longer literally "cut and paste" edited, so today the byline is sometimes placed at the end.


Magazine articles are not written this way.

They are intended to be printed and read in their entirety, and don't need a lede or nutshell paragraph, since it is common to maintain interest by delaying the best information until the end of the story.

Magazine articles do have a "title".

Magazine articles may have "heading"s to divide sections.

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    I have never encountered the word "nutgraph", and would not have had a clue as to what it meant without your explanation. It is not in any of the four dictionaries I have consulted. It gets just nine hits on the NOW corpus, six of which appear to refer to a Malaysian publication or blog of that name. Don't use it if you want to be understood.
    – Colin Fine
    Sep 28, 2022 at 16:25
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    @ColinFine, Google returns 13 million results. Wikipedia has Nut graph - Wikipedia. ¶ But yes, as with most technical terms, the vast majority of people will not know what it means. Sep 28, 2022 at 19:06
  • OK, iWeb has 228 instances of "nut graph" (2 words).
    – Colin Fine
    Sep 28, 2022 at 20:13

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