Newspaper articles are, or were, written so that an editor could simply delete paragraphs from the end, depending on how much space he had to fill. (On a `slow' day, the editor might have room for a complete article.)
Years ago — more than 30 — I figured out how newspaper stories were then written. (Oddly enough, never during my formal education did my teachers explain different writing formats and insist we try them. I have met others who were taught such skills. I think this is one of the reasons writing is so difficult for me: I never know a style ahead of time.)
Newspapers consist of a specific number of pages that are paid for by a combination of advertising, subscriptions, and purchases on that day. An editor cannot print more than he can afford. But news stories, like other non-rivalrous products, can be long at little extra cost for the writer. One of an editor's jobs to force a story to fit the rivalrous format of the newspaper.
To help editors, newspapers established a style. The style enabled editors to end a story that they published in hard copy after every paragraph: the editor would take in more paragraphs than needed and shorten the story as necessary.
The basic format, if I remember correctly was
The `lead' must say `what'; it often includes the `authority', or how the information came to the reporter. (Interestingly, journalists mostly lived in a pre-scientific world in which authority came from people. In addition to science, this contrasts with other human-based activities that do not nowadays specify a particular person, such as the `Hansard' service that records discussions in both houses of the British legislature.
The lead may include when and where; if not, that information must come soon in the story. The overall format followed the five `w' questions of English:
what, who, when, where, and why, except there were two `who's: who told the story, the authority, and to whom the event happened.
(The sixth w question, how, was only asked by engineers and similar people. I do not remember that my local newspaper of 40 years ago told me the `how' of events.)
For example,
what, when, authority
The end of the world took place yesterday, the Pope reported.
where
The whole universe ended, including Non-Christian areas.
details — all of which an editor could cut ....
The ending fitted Christian beliefs in some areas but not all. The beliefs of the locally dominant determined what happened.
more details
Morover, even though they were not believers, people whose belief systems were different from the locally dominant religion, as well as good atheists, went to heaven and the bad of those categories went to hell or its equivalent in the locally dominant religion.
even more details, another paragraph that an editor could cut ...
Evidentally, the ending came after the multiple billions of names of God were said. (A science fiction story, `The Nine Billion Names of God', by famous author Arthur C. Clarke, predicted this.)
an odd-ball detail
A noted anthropomorphic author said that this indicates that we are simulations in a computer run by a very advanced Artificially Intelligent entity, who decided to end this particular computer simulation in this manner.
(Not describing the authority means the writer could not remember the name and book, but remembered reading it years ago. It makes a good ending.)
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