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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. 

Concerns about the spread of misinformation online via news articles have led to the development of many tools and processes involving human annotation of their credibility. However, much is still unknown about how different people judge news credibility or the quality or reliability of news credibility ratings from populations of varying expertise. In this work, we consider credibility ratings from two “crowd” populations: 1) students within journalism or media programs, and 2) crowd workers on UpWork, and compare them with the ratings of two sets of experts: journalists and climate scientists, on a set of 50 climate-science articles. We find that both groups’ credibility ratings have higher correlation to journalism experts compared to the science experts, with 10-15 raters to achieve convergence. We also find that raters’ gender and political leaning impact their ratings. Among article genre of news/opinion/analysis and article source leaning of left/center/right, crowd ratings were more similar to experts respectively with opinion and strong left sources.