My experience working at 5 Canadian daily newspapers is that body type, photo caption type and similar smaller stuff is usually designed to lock to the baseline grid here.
Generally large display type (headlines and the like) are not … because few newspaper designers are willing to put up with the limitations of locking these things to the baseline grid — their leading would all have to be exact multiples of the baseline.
This requires a fair bit of experimenting in the initial design to figure out what range of headline and subheadline sizes will work without throwing the overall white space off too much.
At the paper I am at now, all stories have a label (sometimes called trumpet in Europe), a headline and a subheadline, then the body copy. The label, headline and subheadline are in one box to span the full width of that story and the top of that frame locks in Indesign to a baseline grid. This keeps labels on side-by-side stories aligned. Heads and subheadline vary in size, but there are limitations designed to ensure a smallish variation from story to story of the white space under the subheadline and the frame containing the text. We control this variation by using a publishing system that imposes predefined headline and subheadline sizes on stories being assigned to the page — at a guess about 100 of them for page designers to choose from.
Looking at the samples you posted, it looks like a similar pattern prevails except that the small headlines between briefs in the briefs package appear to be designed to lock to the baseline grid. But clearly, larger display type is not locking.
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