Although it might soon be a dying art, newsprint layout, I found is quite similar to the structure of news articles. All the most important bits come before all the smaller pieces of tangential information.
This comes across not just in placement, but in font size as well. The juiciest stories (depending on the paper) will dominate the front page in big bold snappy print and wit. The less interesting stuff is broken up torwards the end.
Not only that, newpapers have a frankly commercial interest. So not only does the editor have to prioritize the news and arrange it in a fairly aesthetic way, he/she has to fit in advertising as well. The advertising has to match the article in terms of appropriateness and cost. In a digital newspaper that has this automated by 'intelligent' search engines, this can lead to hilarious results, like placing a child adoption advert next to a story about child kidnapping.
On top of all that, it's a daily business. All that frantic boxing in of ever changing data, taking place everyday.
These things can be said of foreign papers as well, in languages that don't even read left to right.
Al-Hayat newspaper. via Woolly Days
Yomiuri Shimbun via jetwit.com
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