13 ideas for fresh news formats

Credit: Photo by Skye Studios on Unsplash

What exactly is a news format? Well, it is typically the way or style a news article is written in.

The traditional format is the inverted pyramid: the who, what, where, when and why all packaged into the lead paragraph of a story. This is a legacy from newspapers with limited column space, frontloading the article with the most important information on top, then offering more context and background information.

But digital news content allows for formats to work with. Let's take a look at some of them.

Custom news styles: Smart Brevity and Semaform

In 2016, US news website Axios came up with a very unorthodox vision of how news could be read. It created its own style called Smart Brevity - the idea being to say more with less.

Any Axios news article is written in this style. Information is bullet-pointed under a range of commonly used sub-headings, such as 'why it matters', 'context', 'caveat', 'the big picture' and so on. These are known as axioms and they are optimised for scanning information.

US news startup Semafor had a similar idea when it launched in 2022. Its style, Semaform, does not rely on bullet points but it does use sub-headings like 'the reporter's view', 'room for disagreement', 'the scoop', to help readers get to the part that matters to them.

Q&A

The trusty Q&A format is popular for celebrity feature writing. Some might call it lazy, others might look at it as an attractive way of spotlighting a notable interviewee.

The classic example is GQ's interview with T-Pain. There are a few paragraphs of context before a back-and-forth exchange between the interviewer and the interviewee. But there are other ways to do a Q&A.

The group Q&A

You could instead do a Q&A with a large group of people or a community. Here's Kerrang! doing a Q&A with the fanbase of Bring Me The Horizon.

The live Q&A

What if you had an expert that could respond to audience questions? The Telegraph did a live cancer Q&A where a range of qualified health experts responded to questions coming in from readers.

Explainers

One of the more popular news formats of our time are explainers. Particularly popular with more historical or complicated topics, an explainer can help 'bring the reader up to speed' on something that is in the news.

News organisations often have whole sections dedicated to explainers, like the Guardian and Vox Media (which is purpose-built for explanatory journalism).

'Explain it to me quickly'

The Guardian's approach is more direct and broken up into sections, like an 'Explain it to me quickly' version which is a Q&A between journalists.

Long-form explainers

Vox Media asks readers to submit topics and subjects they want 'Vox-plained', but its explainers are typically more long-form and in-depth.

FAQs

BBC News has become well-known for its explainers as well. Its explainer pieces often feel more like FAQs, addressing specific questions, like this one explaining the ins and outs of its own licence fee.

Timelines

For complicated stories with lots of different events to unpick, timelines can be an effective way to present the information.

Sky News did this for the recent disappearance of Jay Slater leading up to a body being found, which was later confirmed to be the British teenager.

Fact checks

In a world of mis- and disinformation, fact checks make sure readers are not duped by what they see online.

Commonly, you see individual fact-checks sifting through claims that are circulating online. You typically see this with fact checking organisations like Full Fact, as well as news outlets like Reuters.

BBC Verify, though, did a round-up of fact checks around the election debates surrounding the recent UK general election, which was very successful.

Listicle

A portmanteau of list and article. The defining quality is really the 'insert number and a subject line' headline formula. Popularised by BuzzFeed and still used by them to this day, à la 13 times a celebrity called out a talk show host.

Listicles are commonly used in soft, celebrity stories. But they also work for advice pieces (The Conversation's five ways to keep your pets cool in hot weather), recommendations and reviews (Time Out's 25 best things to do in Brighton), or analysis pieces (Joe Media's six seats to watch in the UK general election). And yes, also this article.

You can go one step fancier. LA Times supplements its 18 best downtown restaurants with a geolocated map.

It does not have to use a number. Pink News compiled and analysed every time Eminem made a reference to transgender people on his latest album. IGN rounded up the best video games of the year so far, using every review that it scored 8 or above.

Lists

Not to be confused with a 'listicle'. Lists should be rather plain and simple, compiling something either newsworthy in itself or it is convenient to have it curated in one place.

BBC News simply listed the salaries of its top-earning stars in today's (23 July 2024) announcement.

We at Journalism.co.uk publish quite a few lists of speakers to book for journalism conferences and people to follow within a specific community.

Here's also a list of reasons why journalists left the news industry, by independent writer and consultant Isabelle Roughol.

Rankings

Rankings are lists but in a specific order. There are two ways you can go with rankings: subjective and objective.

Opinion led

You can go down the BuzzFeed route again, and offer a more opinionated ranking of the top Disney princesses of all time.

Data led

Or you can base your piece on hard data, either as a one-off piece or an ongoing project.

For instance, Press Gazette recently ranked news publishers with the most WhatsApp followers.

The Wall Street Journal has a specific rankings team that publishes the 400 best US colleges since 2016 (paywalled). It is a research project developed with College Pulse and Statista, there is a proper methodology that takes into account student experience, salary impact and social mobility.

Sifted also keeps a running database ranking the top European unicorns, which can be toggled and filtered by a number of factors, including country, age, last funding round size, and total funding to date.

How to

A practical piece that offers a step-by-step guide or set of instructions, like how to read Instagram DMs without the recipient knowing (The Sun) or how to clean your keyboard properly (Wired). Make sure to include screenshots for good measure.

Behind the story

One way to engage audiences and to earn their trust is to show them how the story unfolded.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism does this with a number of its big scoops, like this one about investigating surveillance within the online gig economy.

Reader-informed content

Your audience can be a great source of inspiration and content - to you and to itself.

Surveys

Reader surveys can provide wonderful data to feed back to your audience. Eurogamer does this annually to find out its reader's top 50 games of the year. Sifted leverages more regular reader surveys within its news reporting.

Games

Games are generally a good engagement tool. Sky Sports News has a regular 'team selector' game, where readers can pick the team to start a football match. This gets turned into a 'your starting XI' article.

Features

Readers also have stories to share. The Times looked to their audience to recount their cancer survival stories (paywalled).

Archives and historical content

There is a lot of value in the past worth digging up.

German news organisation Süddeutsche Zeitung turned archived news content into a historical liveblog, as seen on its recount of the 1972 Olympics.

Associated Press runs a Today in History section, listing the key, historical news events of the month.

Predictions

News usually reports on what has happened. But sometimes, we talk about what might happen next.

Nieman Lab runs a popular predictions series at the end of every year with some of the brightest minds across the news industry. It is a healthy forecast of the trends to pay attention to in the next 12 months.

News organisations like Politico are also running expert predictions for the US election in the aftermath of Joe Biden dropping out. The Economist publishes an interactive prediction model too, with more focus on data visualisation (it is currently paused).

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