In print journalism, things are done a certain way, have been for decades. Editors and writers haggle over what's important, choose an order and a placement for the stories. The Associated Press publishes a book's worth of guidelines, dictating everything frm abbreviations to punctuation to how numbers are to be presented.

Never begin a sentence with a numeral, spell it out; spell out numbers less than 10.

The structure of an article is also crucial, born from the logistics of wire services and the method by which people read the newspaper.

The most important information goes first; details are filled in later.

This is called the inverted news pyramid. It works on paper because people tend to skim the headlines and the leads (ledes). The rules of writing for print are so numerous that no self-respecting editor, unless he's memorized the whole of the tradition, is caught without a copy of the AP Stylebook on his desk.

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