Question about Japanese news

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20200127/k10012260821000.html

A bit weird question, but:
When reading NHK news I’ve noticed this thing, where the first and second paragraph of the article are almost word for word the same, with very little new information added to the second one (see link for an example). Is the first paragraph a sort of an abstract of the whole article, if it is then why isn’t it written in bold or something to make it more obvious? It just always feels weird for me to read the same thing again right after reading it the first time :smiley:
I haven’t read much other Japanese news sources so I don’t know if it’s a thing they all share with each other.

I could be missing something, but it just looks like the first paragraph is the headline and the second is the beginning of the article. They repeat things to elaborate on them and likely the beginning of the article and headline are both going to be the most interesting part.

I didn’t really read the article though so I could be wrong :sweat_smile:

Perhaps I was being unclear :smiley: I actually didn’t mean the headline, but the two paragraphs after it. So translating it with google translate gives us:

A group from Osaka University announced that it had performed the world’s first surgery in which heart muscle cells made from iPS cells were sheeted and directly attached to the heart of patients with severe heart disease. Attention will be paid to verifying safety and effectiveness in the future.

A group of Professor Yoshiki Sawa of the Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University, made a sheet of heart muscle cells made from iPS cells that form various tissues in the body, and directly attached them to the heart of patients with severe heart disease. We aim to establish a treatment that restores function.

It’s not a big deal but I just found it curious seeing it in so many of their articles (and sometimes even multiple times in the same article) :slightly_smiling_face:

Yeah, it’s a reasonably standard news-writing style anywhere. The first paragraph basically summarises the whole article, while the second paragraph starts going into more detail.

Here’s an example from today’s Sydney Morning Herald, an English newspaper:

Australians are being advised to reconsider all travel to China following the coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 100 people, spread across the world and rattled financial markets.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne said early on Wednesday morning that updated travel advice on the Smartraveller website now advised Australians to “reconsider your need to travel to China overall”, and “do not travel to Hubei Province”, the epicentre of the virus outbreak.

Basically, the first paragraph is “reconsider all travel to China” while the second paragraph is "the Foreign Minister said ‘reconsider all travel to China’ ".

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