As a matter of style and to heighten the sense of immediacy, many established English-language newspapers use the present tense for news story summaries and photo captions. I have a feeling that the sentence you presented, “Two people are killed after their car veers off the road and crashes into a roadside lamppost,” is one such news summary, which is normally set in a bigger typeface in boldface or italics before the news story proper or lumped together with other news summaries in a boxed format. I’m sure you’ve come across many such news summaries in the daily newspapers in your own country and elsewhere. The writers and editors of those news summaries are deliberately using the present tense for past events and are certainly not being careless with their English grammar and usage.
As a rule, newspaper writers and editors also use the present tense for photo captions. For immediacy’s sake, they use the present tense when describing the action in the photograph, as in this caption for a photo in today’s online edition of
The Manila Times:
ANGRY MNLF FIGHTERS SAILING TO SABAH. Malaysia’s Defense Minister Zahid Hamidi shows a picture of dead Filipino gunmen at Tanduo Village after the air and ground assault launched on Tuesday against up to 300 invaders.
Usually, after rendering the first sentence of a photo caption in the present tense, the caption writers and the editors revert to the past tense for subsequent sentences in the caption that describe past actions or events.
The main news story related to the photo will, of course, always use the past tense for the actions and events being reported as having already happened.
