Kinds of story
Beat-up
A story exaggerated well beyond its real importance to make it seem bigger than it is.
A beat-up is a thin story pumped up with breathless language and a screaming headline to look bigger than it is. The facts may be true, but the weight given to them is not. It is a term of criticism in the newsroom, and rightly so: readers eventually notice when a paper cries wolf, and trust is hard to win back. Australian journalists use the phrase freely.