(The title is shameless taken from the book A Mathematician Reads a Newspaper)
A standard practice of writing in journalism, as the author claims, is to write in inverted pyramid fashion, i.e., beginning a news story with a headline, then a lead paragraph or two in which the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How questions are briefly angered, followed by the body of the story, the most salient details first. If a new idea is introduced later, its development has this same inverted-pyramid structure: a smaller headline, followed by the lead and then more details.
Sounds simple enough, but why, one may ask. The advantage of this structure is that the story may be truncated anywhere, its end cut off for typographic or other reasons, and what remains still makes sense. A more important advantage, both good and bad, is that the reader can read parts of the text depending on how much information she wishes to learn.
However, one problem with this approach is that not all forms of writing will retain its under the inverted-pyramid structure. For example, trying to summarize the contents of a research finding into a headline or lead paragraph might generate spurious meaning. Additionally, stories that begin by focusing on the intriguing predicament of some engaging individual, might lose their charm if restructured in this form.
Perhaps, a compromise of essential facts and a more leisurely fleshing of these facts is the reasonable approach. A short inverted-pyramid followed by longer diamond-shaped story with proper buildup.