Mainstream media (MSM) are those media disseminated via the largest distribution channels,

which therefore represent what the majority of media consumers are likely to encounter. The
term also denotes those media generally reflective of the prevailing currents of thought,
influence, or activity.[1]

Large news conglomerates, including newspapers and broadcast media, which underwent
successive mergers in the U.S. and elsewhere at an increasing rate beginning in the 1990s, are
often referenced by the term. This consolidation of ownership has raised concerns of a
progressive homogenization of viewpoints presented to news consumers. Consequently, the term
mainstream media has been widely used in conversation and the blogosphere, often in
oppositional, pejorative, or dismissive senses, in discussion of the mass media and media bias.

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A blog (a blend of the term web log)[1] is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually
maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other
material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological
order. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via
widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites.
[2]

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more
personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web
pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an
interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although
some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (video blogging), music (MP3
blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short
posts.

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Soft and Hard News

Infotainment versus Journalism

Some define "journalism" only as reporting on "serious" subjects, where common journalistic
standards are upheld by the reporter. Others believe that the larger "news business" encompasses
everything from professional journalism to so-called "soft news" and "infotainment", and support
activities such as marketing, advertising sales, finance and delivery. Professional journalism is
supposed to place more emphasis on research, fact-checking, and the public interest than its
"non-journalistic" counterparts. Because the term "news" is quite broad, the terms "hard" and
"soft" denote both a difference in respective standards for news value, as well as for standards of
conduct, relative to the professional ideals of journalistic integrity.
The idea of hard news embodies two orthogonal concepts:

• Seriousness: Politics, economics, crime, war, and disasters are considered serious topics,
as are certain aspects of law, business, science, and technology.
• Timeliness: Stories that cover current events—the progress of a war, the results of a vote,
the breaking out of a fire, a significant statement, the freeing of a prisoner, an economic
report of note.

The logical opposite, soft news is sometimes referred to in a derogatory fashion as

infotainment. Defining features catching the most criticism include:

• The least serious subjects: Arts and entertainment, sports, lifestyles, "human interest",
and celebrities.
• Not timely: There is no precipitating event triggering the story, other than a reporter's
curiosity.

Timely events happen in less serious subjects—sporting matches, celebrity misadventures, movie
releases, art exhibits, and so on.

There may also be serious reports which are not event-driven—coverage of important social,
economic, legal, or technological trends; investigative reports which uncover ongoing
corruption, waste, or immorality; or discussion of unsettled political issues without any special
reason. Anniversaries, holidays, the end of a year or season, or the end of the first 100 days of an
administration, can make some stories time-sensitive, but provide more of an opportunity for
reflection and analysis than any actual "news" to report.

The spectrum of "seriousness" and "importance" is not well-defined, and different media
organizations make different tradeoffs. "News you can use", a common marketing phrase
highlighting a specific genre of journalism, spans the gray area. Gardening tips and hobby
"news" pretty clearly fall at the entertainment end. Warnings about imminent natural disasters or
acute domestic security threats (such as air raids or terrorist attacks) are considered so important
that broadcast media (even non-news channels) usually interrupt other programming to announce
them. A medical story about a new treatment for breast cancer, or a report about local ground
water pollution might fall in between. So might book reviews, or coverage of religion. On the
other hand, people frequently find hobbies and entertainment to be worthwhile parts of their lives
and so "importance" on a personal level is rather subjective.

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Headline (or hed)

Main article: Headline

The headline, heading, head or title of a story; "hed" in journalists' jargon.2 Rarely a complete
sentence (e.g. "Pilot Flies Below Bridges to Save Divers").
Subhead (or dek or deck)

A phrase, sentence or several sentences near the title of an article or story, a quick blurb or article
teaser.2

Lead (or lede) or intro

For Wikipedia guidelines on lead paragraphs, see Wikipedia:Lead section.

The most important structural element of a story is the lead (or "intro" in the UK) — the story's
first, or leading, sentence. (Some American English writers use the spelling lede (pronounced /
ˈliːd/), from the archaic English, to avoid confusion with the printing press type formerly made
from lead or the related typographical term leading.3)

Charnley4 states that "an effective lead is a 'brief, sharp statement of the story's essential facts.'"5
The lead is usually the first sentence, or in some cases the first two sentences, and is ideally 20-
25 words in length. The top-loading principle (putting the most important information first - see
inverted pyramid section below) applies especially to leads, but the unreadability of long
sentences constrains the lead's size. This makes writing a lead an optimization problem, in which
the goal is to articulate the most encompassing and interesting statement that a writer can make
in one sentence, given the material with which he or she has to work. While a rule of thumb says
the lead should answer most or all of the five Ws, few leads can fit all of these.

To "bury the lead" in news style refers to beginning a description with details of secondary
importance to the readers, forcing them to read more deeply into an article than they should have
to in order to discover the essential point(s).

Article leads are sometimes categorized into hard leads and soft leads. A hard lead aims to
provide a comprehensive thesis which tells the reader what the article will cover. A soft lead
introduces the topic in a more creative, attention-seeking fashion, and is usually followed by a
nut graph (a brief summary of facts).6

Media criticswho? often note that the lead can be the most polarizing subject in the article. Often
critics accuse the article of bias based on an editor's choice of headline and/or lead.citation needed

Nut graph (various spellings)

Main article: Nut graph

One or more brief paragraphs that summarise the news value of the story, sometimes bullet-
pointed and/or set off in a box. The various spellings are contractions of the expression nutshell
paragraph. Nut graphs are used particularly in feature stories (see below).

Inverted pyramid

Main article: Inverted pyramid

Journalists usually describe the organization or structure of a news story as an inverted pyramid.
The journalist puts the essential and most interesting elements of his or her story at the
beginning, with supporting information following in order of diminishing importance.

This structure enables readers to stop reading at any point and still come away with the essence
of a story. It allows people to explore a topic to only the depth that their curiosity takes them, and
without the imposition of details or nuances that they could consider irrelevant, but still making
that information available to more interested readers.

The inverted pyramid structure also enables articles to be trimmed to any arbitrary length during
layout, to fit in the space available.

Writers are often admonished "Don't bury the lead!" to ensure that they present the most
important facts first, rather than requiring the reader to go through several paragraphs to find
them.

Some writers start their stories with the "1-2-3 lead". This format invariably starts with a "Five
Ws" opening paragraph (as described above), followed by an indirect quote that serves to support
a major element of the first paragraph, and then a direct quote to support the indirect quote.citation
needed

Feature style
News stories aren't the only type of material that appear in newspapers and magazines. Longer
articles, such as magazine cover articles and the pieces that lead the inside sections of a
newspaper, are known as features. Feature stories differ from straight news in several ways.
Foremost is the absence of a straight-news lead, most of the time. Instead of offering the essence
of a story up front, feature writers may attempt to lure readers in.

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blurb - a promotional statement (as found on the dust jackets of books); "the author got all his friends to
write blurbs for his book"

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Flag= The masthead of a newspaper./the nameplate

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masthead - a listing printed in all issues of a newspaper or magazine (usually on the editorial page) that
gives the name of the publication and the names of the editorial staff, etc.

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In the newspaper industry, a tabloid is a smaller newspaper format per spread; for a weekly or
semi-weekly alternative newspaper that focuses on local-interest stories and entertainment, often
distributed free of charge (often in a relatively small newspaper format); or for a newspaper that
tends to sensationalize and emphasize or exaggerate sensational crime stories, gossip columns
repeating scandalous and innuendos about the deeply personal lives of celebrities and sports
stars, and other so-called "junk food news" or junk mail (often in a relatively small newspaper
format). As the term "tabloid" has become synonymous with down-market newspapers in some
areas, some small-format papers which claim a higher standard of journalism refer to themselves
as "compact" newspapers instead.

The tabloid newspaper format is particularly popular in the United Kingdom where its page
dimensions are roughly 430 × 280 mm (16.9 in × 11.0 in). Larger newspapers, traditionally
associated with 'higher-quality' journalism, are called broadsheets though several British 'quality'
papers have recently adopted the tabloid format. Another UK newspaper format is the Berliner,
which is sized between the tabloid and the broadsheet and has been adopted by The Guardian
and its sister paper The Observer.

The word "Tabloid" comes from the name given by the London based pharmaceutical company
Burroughs Wellcome & Co. to the compressed tablets they marketed as "Tabloid" pills in the late
1880s [1]. Prior to compressed tablets, medicine was usually taken in bulkier powder form. While
Burroughs Wellcome & Co. were not the first to derive the technology to make compressed
tablets, they were the most successful at marketing them, hence the popularity of the term
'tabloid' in popular culture. The connotation of tabloid was soon applied to other small items and
to the "compressed" journalism that condensed stories into a simplified, easily-absorbed format.
The label of "tabloid journalism" (1901) preceded the smaller sheet newspapers that contained it
(1918).

An early pioneer of tabloid journalism was Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe
(1865–1922), who amassed a large publishing empire of halfpenny papers by rescuing
failing stolid papers and transforming them to reflect the popular taste, which yielded him
enormous profits. Harmsworth used his tabloids to influence public opinion, for example,
by bringing down the wartime government of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith in
the Shell Crisis of 1915.