You're right, many "news" articles don't follow that traditional format. The difference is that your examples are not the primary news article about an importan

You're right, many "news" articles don't follow that traditional format. The difference is that your examples are not the primary news article about an important event. They are either commentary / color on an important event, an opinion piece, or human interest piece about something interesting (but not really "news"-worthy). Of course, much of what is in the paper is not "hard news" so some sort of automatic summarization could be useful for those pieces.