Breakdown of O jornal informou que tinha publicado uma manchete exclusiva.
ter
to have
um
a / an / some (all forms)
o jornal
the newspaper
que
that (conjunction)
Questions & Answers about O jornal informou que tinha publicado uma manchete exclusiva.
Why do we use tinha publicado instead of just publicou here?
This is an example of reported speech. Because the introductory verb (informou) is already in the past tense, the action that happened even earlier shifts further back into the past. We use the compound past perfect tense (tinha plus the past participle) to indicate that an action occurred before another action in the past, equivalent to 'had published' in English.
If we were quoting the newspaper directly, what tense would they have used?
In direct speech, the newspaper would have used the simple past, saying something like: Publicámos uma manchete exclusiva (We published an exclusive headline). When reporting this past event later, that simple past shifts one step further back to the past perfect (tinha publicado).
manchete is a feminine word. Why doesn't the verb change to publicada to match it?
When forming compound tenses with the auxiliary verb ter, the past participle never changes to match the object. It always stays in its default masculine singular form, ending in -o. You only make the past participle agree in gender and number when it is used as an adjective or with verbs like ser and estar in the passive voice.
Does the word jornal mean both 'newspaper' and 'journal'?