How to write a news article: format, structure and example

This guide is part of our AP style guide. It ends with a complete example article, annotated paragraph by paragraph.

The 8 steps at a glance

Step 1: find the angle (news values)

A topic is not a story. "The school budget" is a topic. "The school board voted to close two schools to cover a $3.1 million gap" is a story. The angle is what happened, to whom, and why a reader should care now.

Editors judge stories on news values. Most journalism courses teach a version of this list:

Write your angle as one sentence before you research. It will change, but it keeps you from collecting everything.

Step 2: research and sources

Start with what is written down; documents are harder to spin than people.

• Documents and data: agendas, minutes, budgets, court filings, inspection records, the agency's own reports.
• Studies: for health, science or policy, find the actual paper, not the press release about it, and check whether it is peer-reviewed, a preprint or retracted.
• People: the decision-maker, the people affected, an independent expert, and anyone the story criticizes.

Keep a source list as you go (each document with its link, each person with title and phone). You will need it in step 7.

Step 3: interview and record

Prepare five to eight open questions ("How did the board reach this number?"). Ask for specifics: dates, amounts, documents you can see. Save the hard question for near the end, close with "Who else should I talk to?", and confirm the spelling of every name and the exact title.

Recording. Record if you can, with permission. Federal law and most states allow recording when one party to the conversation consents, but about a dozen states require the consent of everyone in the conversation, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. [1] The safe habit is to ask on the recording: "Is it OK if I record this?" Our interview transcription guide covers consent rules and tools, and from transcript to story covers turning a recording into quotes.

Step 4: write the lead

The lead is the first sentence of a news story. It carries the single most important fact, plus as many of who, what, when and where as fit cleanly.

Test your lead with three questions:

1. Would a reader who stops here know what happened?
2. Does it lead with the action, not the time, place or meeting?
3. Is it under about 35 words?

(Both are fictional examples.)

Put the day of the week in the lead for events within the past week ("Tuesday"), not "yesterday." AP style uses the day of the week for dates within seven days and the date for anything further away.

Step 5: structure the body (inverted pyramid)

Most news stories use the inverted pyramid, a structure that puts the most important facts first and orders everything after it by falling importance. After the lead come the why, the best quote, supporting facts, the other side, what happens next, and finally background that is safe to cut. Keep paragraphs to one to three sentences; the annotated example below shows the order. Our full guide to the inverted pyramid has a diagram, history and template.

Step 6: quotes and attribution (AP rules)

Attribution tells the reader where each fact came from. In a news article, every fact that is not common knowledge or something you saw yourself needs a source.

The AP basics:

What to quote. Quote opinion, emotion and memorable phrasing. Paraphrase facts and numbers, which you can state more clearly yourself. "The district will save $1.4 million a year" is a paraphrase with attribution; "No one on this board wanted to do this" is a quote.

Partial quotes and ellipses. Use partial quotes sparingly, and never use an ellipsis to remove words that change the meaning.

Check the current AP Stylebook for edge cases; it is updated every year. [2]

Step 7: fact-check

Before you file, check every claim against your source list: names and titles; every number against the original document (recompute percentages yourself); dates and days of the week; quotes against the recording, word for word; studies (the paper says what you say, and is not retracted); and fairness (anyone criticized had a real chance to respond, high in the story).

For a full process, see our editor's checklist on how to fact-check an article.

Step 8: headline, dateline, byline

Headline. Subject, active verb, key fact, present tense, sentence case in AP style: "School board votes to close two elementary schools." Our guide to how to write a headline covers formulas and SEO.

Byline. Your name, and your title or outlet if required: "By Jordan Lee, Staff Writer."

Dateline. A dateline is the place name at the start of a story that tells readers where the reporting happened. In AP style:

In the body text, AP has spelled out state names since 2014. [3]

Complete example article with notes

The article below is a fictional example. Brennan County, its schools and every person, number and quote are invented.

School board votes to close two elementary schools

By Jordan Lee, Staff Writer

BRENNAN FALLS, Ore. — The Brennan County school board voted 5-2 Tuesday to
close two elementary schools next June, moving about 600 students to three
other buildings.

The board said falling enrollment and a $3.1 million budget gap left it no
choice. District enrollment has dropped 18% since 2016, according to a
district report presented at the meeting.

"No one on this board wanted to do this," board chair Maria Okafor said.
"But we can't keep paying to heat half-empty buildings while we cut
teachers."

Lincoln and Westview elementary schools will close. Their students will move
to Ridge, Oakmont and Fairview elementary schools, which the district says
have room for about 750 more students.

The district expects to save about $1.4 million a year, mostly in building
and staff costs, the report says.

About 150 parents attended, and 22 spoke against the plan. Several said the
change would add 20 minutes or more to their children's bus rides.

"My daughter already leaves at 7:05," said Angela Price, whose two children
attend Westview. "Now she'll leave in the dark."

Board member Dan Reyes, who voted no, said the district had not studied bus
routes. "We are voting on a map nobody has driven," he said.

Superintendent Carla Mendes said Wednesday that the district will publish
new bus routes by March 1 and hold meetings for affected families in
January.

Lincoln Elementary opened in 1954. Westview opened in 1971. The board last
closed a school in 2009.

Paragraph by paragraph:

Writing and checking a news story in WriteOrbit

WriteOrbit is an AI writing editor that runs in any browser, including on a phone, which makes it workable from a meeting room or a courthouse hallway. It does not have a news story template, so paste the example structure above into a new document.

Three steps where it helps:

1. Research. Search 250M+ scholarly works from inside the editor and type @ to cite a study. Upload long documents (a budget, a court filing, the study itself) to the Library as PDFs and use Ask on each one; its answers carry page numbers, so you can open the page and confirm before you write the sentence.
2. Check before filing. Run AI review. Claim checks, source-quality flags (retracted papers, preprints, wrong DOIs), proofreading and tone notes appear as comments on the exact sentences.
3. Hand off to your editor. Share the document. Edits come back as suggestions (tracked changes) you accept or reject, with comments beside them and version history underneath.

WriteOrbit does not check AP style rules or write headlines for you; use the tables above and your stylebook for that. The free plan covers the full editor with daily AI limits; see pricing.

FAQ

What is the format of a news article?

A news article has a headline, a byline, a dateline if it was reported outside your home area, a one-sentence lead with the core news, and a body ordered by importance: the why, the best quote, supporting facts, the other side, what happens next and background. Paragraphs are short, usually one to three sentences, and every fact is attributed.

How long should a news article be?

Length follows the news. A brief can be 100 to 200 words, a typical local news story 400 to 800, and an important story with several sources 1,000 or more. Write it tight, then let the editor cut from the bottom. If you can say it in 500 words, a 900-word version is padding.

How do you write a dateline in AP style?

Write the city in capital letters, followed by the state in AP's abbreviation (not the postal code), then a dash: BRENNAN FALLS, Ore. — Large cities on AP's standalone list, such as CHICAGO or BOSTON, appear without a state. Use a dateline only when you report the story from that place.

Should a news article use said or says?

Use said. News stories report what happened, so attribution is in the past tense, and AP prefers said over loaded verbs such as claimed, admitted or stated. Put the name before the verb (Okafor said) unless a long title follows the name, in which case the verb can come first.

How do students write a news article?

Students should follow the same 8 steps as working reporters: pick an angle with clear news value, gather documents and at least two human sources, record interviews with permission, write a one-sentence lead, order the body by importance, attribute every fact, check every name and number, and add a headline. School stories still need named sources.

Next steps

Every rule in this guide sits inside AP style; the AP style guide collects the 25 rules writers get wrong most. If your story starts with interviews, read from transcript to story next for how to find, quote and check interview material.

Sources

1. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, "Reporter's Recording Guide: Introduction." https://www.rcfp.org/introduction-to-reporters-recording-guide/
2. The Associated Press Stylebook (online edition). https://www.apstylebook.com/
3. Poynter, "AP: spell out names of states in stories," April 2014. https://www.poynter.org/news/ap-spell-out-names-states-stories