3
The smarty tag is generated this way, one tag that contains both the topic and the article title, instead of creating two separated smarty items.
If you only want to change the look, CSS solution suggested before is fine, but if you want more control on your template, you should have topic title and article title as separated objects.
In News 1.53 there are other smarty tags you could use:
<{$story.news_title}> --> Just the article title
<{$story.topic_title}> --> Just the topic title
This way you'd have separated items to work with.