Why print editors love sidebars

A sidebar is a newspaper term that is used to describe a related story placed next to the main story. Newspaper editors have long used sidebars to provide an extra dimension to a news report. Sometimes, if the story is very important, and comprises multiple elements, newspapers may use two sidebars.

Sidebars are also an important element of magazine design. Magazine editors run sidebars as ruled boxes or use screen to set text. The colour of the screen can range from the sedate grey to the bold reds and yellows to the peaceful greens and blues.  The colour is based on the mood of the story, the dominant colour of the pictures used on the magazine page or the colours used to typeset headlines.

# Characteristics
The main characteristics of a sidebar are:

1. It is related to the main story.
2. It is short, and rarely extends beyond three to five paragraphs.
3. It builds on a sub-theme of the main story.

# Functions
The Sidebar performs three main functions:

1. It reduces the length of the main story.
2. It adds value to the main report. The reader gets to learn something extra about the subject.
3. When set in colour it works as a design tool

# Example
For instance, while covering the crash of a passenger aircraft in your city you learn about the heroic efforts of a fireman that helped save three lives.  Your main story will be the hard news story; it will inform readers about how many passengers died when the plane crashed; it will narrate the tale of the ill-fated plane as it came in to land, overshot the runway and burst into flames.

At the same time you will build a small story around the fireman who braved the flames to help three passengers escape to safety. This human interest story will be placed next to the main story, ideally in a ruled box so that it catches the attention of the readers.

This is the advantage that sidebars bring to newspaper reporting. They help tell stories in a much more interesting manner.

# On the web
The term sidebar is now also used in web design too. However, in web design a sidebar is the column adjacent to the text window. It is used to publish advertisements, related stories, opinion polls, external links etc.