Readers find the active voice easier to grasp than the passive voice - just as in print.
In short, people reading articles on computer screens want them to be clear, clean and direct, the style that characterizes news services like The Associated Press. With that in mind, it is worth spending a little while learning what the news-service pros do and do not do as they write their copy. When the authors of Campus Weblines spent a month with the Stuyvesant 8 at their school in lower Manhattan in New York City, much of the teaching time was spent on writing exercises like the ones in this chapter. Many of those exercises dealt with writing a lead, the crucial first paragraph of a news article, and that is where this chapter on newswriting starts as well. We will then take a wider view and look at the structure of different kinds of articles.