Brief news items.

The principal function of a brief news item is to inform the reader. It states facts without giving explicit comments/ news items are essentially matter-of-fact, and stereotyped forms of expression prevail. But apart from this, newspaper style has its specific vocabulary features and is characterized by an extensive use of:

special political and economic terms (socialism, constitution, president, apartheid, gross output);
non-term political vocabulary (public, people, progressive, nation-wide, unity, peace);
newspaper clichés \stereotyped expressions; commonplace phrases familiar to the reader\ (vital issue, pressing necessity, informed sources, danger of war, to escalate a war, war hysteria, captains of industry, pillars of society);
abbreviations (UNO, Trade Union Congress, NATO, UFO, European Economic Community, Foreign Office, MP, VIP);
neologisms. The newspaper is very quick to react to any new development in the life of society, science and technology. Hence, neologisms make their way into the language of the newspaper very easily and often even spring up on newspaper pages (lunic – a machine to study the Moon; a splash-down – a landing on water; a sit-in – a strike when the strikers sit on their places but do not work; stop-go policies – contradictory, indecisive and inefficient policies);
complex sentences with a developed system of clauses (“There are indications that BOAC may withdraw threats of all-out dismissals for pilots who restrict flying hours, a spokesman for the British Airline Pilots’ Association said yesterday”.);
verbal constructions (“…he set this example by announcing the disbanding of his faction numbering 47 of the total of 95 conservative members of the Lower House…”);
syntactical complexes, especially the nominative with the infinitive. These constructions are largely used to avoid mentioning the source of information or to shun responsibility for the facts reported (“The condition of Lord Samuel, aged 92, was said last night to be ‘a little better’”);
attributive noun groups are powerful means of effecting brevity (heart swap patient, the national income and expenditure figures, Labour backbench decision);
specific word-order. In one-sentence news paragraphs and in leads \the initial sentences in longer news items\ is more or less fixed. Journalistic practice has developed what is called the ‘five-w-and-h-pattern rule’ (who-what-why-how-where-when) and for a long time strictly adhered to it. (“A neigh- bour’s peep through a letter box led to the finding of a woman dead from gas and two others semiconscious in a block of council flats in Eccles New Road, Salford, Lanc., yesterday.”).

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