Abstract

The inverted pyramid is a basic structure of news reporting used by journalists to convey information and it is considered a key element of objectivity in news reporting. In this article, we propose the Inverted Pyramid Scoring method to evaluate how well a news article follows the inverted pyramid structure using main event descriptors (5W1H) extraction and news summarization. We evaluate our proposed method on a proprietary data set of Associated Press news articles across breaking and non-breaking news spanning two topics—political and business. Our results show that the method works at distinguishing the structural differences between breaking and non-breaking news. In particular, our results confirm that breaking news articles are more likely to follow the inverted pyramid structure.