Journalistic Style

News Czech is its own dialect of the written language. It is grammatically standard — you will not find the colloquial endings here that you meet in the pub — but it has a tight set of stylistic habits built for one purpose: pack the maximum information into the minimum space, while sounding objective. If you can read a Czech headline and a news lead, you can read most of the serious press. This page lays out the machinery: compressed headlines, participial packing, the passive and reflexive-passive for objectivity, nominalisation, and the attribution toolkit (podle, prý, údajně). This is the journalism-specific companion to the broader page on written versus spoken Czech.

The compressed headline

Headlines (titulky) strip out everything a reader can reconstruct. The favourite move is to drop the verb entirely, especially the copula být ("to be") and verbs of motion or location, leaving a noun phrase and a place or time.

Expanded into a full sentence, that headline is something like Prezident je v Bruselu or Prezident přijel do Bruselu. The headline trusts you to put the verb back. Other compressions you will meet constantly:

A second headline habit is dropping the auxiliary in compound tenses and passives. Czech can leave out a je or byl and let the participle stand alone:

Participial attributes: relative clauses squeezed into modifiers

This is the single densest feature of news Czech and the one that most slows English readers down. Instead of writing out a full relative clause — inflace, která roste ("inflation that is rising") — journalism collapses it into a single participial attribute placed before the noun: rostoucí inflace ("rising inflation"). One word does the work of a whole clause.

Czech has two such participles, and the press uses both heavily:

• The active participle in -oucí / -ící turns "which is doing X" into a pre-noun modifier: rostoucí ("rising"), klesající ("falling"), probíhající ("ongoing"), vedoucí ("leading"). See the active participle.
• The passive participle as adjective, in -ný / -tý, turns "which was/has been X-ed" into a modifier: přijatá opatření ("the adopted measures"), zveřejněná zpráva ("the published report"), zadržený pachatel ("the detained perpetrator").

The payoff is density: a single headline-friendly noun phrase can carry information that English needs a clause for. The cost, for a reader, is that you must mentally unpack each participle back into its clause. The deep dive lives in participial attributes as reduced relatives.

The two passives, both for objectivity

Journalism loves the passive because it lets you report an event without committing to who did it — perfect for objectivity, and handy when the agent is unknown or irrelevant. Czech has two passives and uses both in the press.

The participial passive (být + short participle) reports a specific completed event:

The reflexive passive (verb + se) is even more common in general statements and procedures, because it backgrounds the agent completely:

When the agent is named in a participial passive, it takes the instrumental case — schválen vládou ("approved by the government"); see the instrumental as the passive agent and the choice between the two passives in the reflexive passive.

Nominalisation: turning verbs into nouns

Formal Czech, and news Czech especially, prefers to nominalise — to express an action as a noun rather than a verb. Instead of "the government decided," the report writes "the government's decision"; instead of "prices rose," it writes "the rise in prices." Verbal nouns in -ní / -tí (rozhodnutí "decision," zvýšení "increase," zveřejnění "publication," zatčení "arrest") do this work, and they let a sentence cram several actions into one clause.

The effect is a compressed, impersonal, official tone — the verbal energy is locked away inside the nouns. English does the same in officialese ("upon completion of the investigation…"), so the instinct is familiar; Czech simply uses it as the default news register.

Attribution: podle, prý, údajně

Reporters must constantly mark whose claim a statement is. Czech has a clean toolkit for this, and using it correctly is the difference between reporting and asserting.

podle + genitive — "according to." The workhorse of sourcing. The source goes into the genitive: podle mluvčího ("according to the spokesperson"), podle policie ("according to the police"), podle ministerstva ("according to the ministry"), podle zdroje ("according to a source").

prý — the reportative particle, "supposedly / reportedly / they say." It flags a claim as second-hand without naming the source, and it slips into the sentence as an unstressed clitic. It carries a faint note of "I'm passing this on, I don't vouch for it." See prý, the reportative particle.

údajně — "allegedly / reportedly," the more formal, adverbial cousin of prý. Newspapers prefer it in serious copy, especially around accusations not yet proven in court.

Front-loaded information and reported speech

News Czech front-loads the most important fact. Unlike English headlines, which often lead with the subject, Czech happily fronts a time, place, or topic and parks the new, weighty information at the end of the sentence — the natural Czech information flow. And because Czech has no tense backshift in reported speech, a quote keeps its original tense: "he said the talks are continuing," not "were continuing." See reported speech without backshift.

A worked example: headline to full sentence

Take the bare headline and rebuild the lead a reporter would write under it.

Look at how much machinery the full lead deploys at once: podle + genitive for the source, the reflexive passive se zpomalilo to background the agent, and the participial attribute rostoucí ceny to compress a relative clause. That stacking is the signature of the register. For a complete sentence-by-sentence walkthrough of a real item, see a short news item.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

None of these features is exotic on its own — English journalism nominalises and attributes too. What makes Czech news writing distinctive is the participial density and the headline ellipsis: the habit of letting a single inflected word stand in for a whole clause, and of trusting the reader to reinsert the missing verb. Train your eye to expand those, and the register opens up.