How to structure articles for online publication

This is the strap-line. It’s about 15 words long. Sometimes we might use a “stand first”.

When we use the inverted pyramid structure, the first paragraph of any digital news story summarises what the entire story is about. This one is no exception. This article is a guide to formatting online content. If you follow this structure for your own stories, you won’t go far wrong.

You’ll notice that we started the article with a headline. The headline should be 60 characters long, so that it displays correctly in search results, and in “sentence case”. Some American websites use “Title Case” instead – where every word begins with a capital letter. In the UK and Europe, the style for headlines is always in sentence case.

There’s something else about the headline. It’s descriptive. There are no jokes or puns in it and it’s very clear what this article is about. In printed newspapers and magazines you can sometimes be more creative, but online you are competing with lots of other articles about similar subjects. To make your article stand out clearly in search results you should tell readers exactly what the story is about in the headline.

Under the headline you’ll see a strap-line or “strap”. The strap-line is a sort of teaser for the rest of the article. It expands on the information in the story and tells the reader a bit more about what to expect. The style for this website is to format that strap using italics, so please make sure that you do the same when writing your own articles.

Sometimes, instead of a strap, the first paragraph of text is formatted differently to the rest of the article. It may be formatted bold or in italics. This is an example of a stand first – an alternative to a strap.

Above the fold

We say that everything in the first screen’s worth of an article is “above the fold”. This is an old newspaper term meaning “at the top”. The content that appears above the fold has a lot of work to do. It has to tell the reader what the piece is about and do that in an interesting way. For this reason, after the first paragraph of this article, there’s an image. This image does a lot of heavy lifting for us.

It’s a diagram, so it helps us to explain the concept of the “inverted pyramid” in a visual way that’s easy for readers to understand. Its position at the top of the article is designed to capture the reader’s attention. Finally, we use it to break up the flow of the article and prevent it from starting with a big, solid block of text. Why’s that? We’re glad you asked…

Online readers tend to scan rather than read content, so we break up the text to maintain their interest and to give them something meaningful to “scan”. There are a few ways we can do this.

• Bullet points or numbered lists can break up the flow of text.
• Photos, video, tables and graphics can be used to break up the article too – but don’t overdo it.
• Cross-headings or sub-headings are smaller headlines that can be used at the beginning of a section. There’s a sub-heading three paragraphs above this list, for example.
• We use short paragraphs. None of the paragraphs in this article is longer than five lines.
• Use a mixture of short and long sentences.
• Review your work and make sure that there is never a full screen that only contains text.
• If something is wrong when you review the work, fix it. Never say “that’ll do”.

This article is designed to introduce you to the bare essentials, the minimum you need to know to structure an article for online publication properly. Over the coming weeks and months, this should all become second nature to you. By the end of the first year, you will need to know all this as you’ll be creating digital content regularly for newsdays.