They write the story more like a mystery novel than a news account. The gist of the story should be up front so that the W questions, What, Who, When, Where are immediately answered.
The Los Angeles Times had a 24 March story of about 20 column inches on the Players Chamionship. The first 10 inches or so described Tiger Woods’ troubles on the course, presumeably because he is distracted by the serious illness of his father. The last 10 inches finally got around to describing who was leading the tournament and other things about it.
David, consider if you will, what it’s like to be a foreigner within the United States, come Olympics time. The first time for me was as a 14 year old in 1976, and the 2nd was as a competitor at the Los Angeles games in cycling. Man, the way NBC cranks up those quasi tragic human interest stories, you’d swear that no other human on the planet has ever faced adversity - like fucking ever…
But you know the worst part? For 25, 30 years non American news outlets swam against the tide, trying to fight the good fight. But now, they all realise that hey! It sells product. Doesn’t matter what the product is of course… airtime, print media, you name it… they’ve all realised that milking the human interest personal tragedy angle sells more product than anything else… so it’s the same all the world over now sadly.
Oh, just in closing - one of my fave moments of the LA Games was the closing ceremony and I got pretty drunk during the in field performance with my Aussie team mates - along with the legendary Daley Thompson. And being the cheeky bugger that he is, he was wearing a custom made t-shirt that night which said in big letters on the front “Thanks LA for a great Olympics” and on the back it said… “But your TV sucks!”. He recall him doing about 15 separate TV interviews with American journalists that night, and every time, foreign camera crews filmed him from behind. Funny stuff.
Has anyone else noticed that the sports stories about a specific game are often written out of order? They tell you the end of the game. Then they tell you the middle. Then they go back to the beginning, tell you about it up to the middle, then quit. Makes the end of the story seem very odd. I guess they don’t really expect you to read the whole story. Two or three papers I read all do it the same way, so I guess they all get their stories from AP or something. Or they all use the same style manual.
I don’t object to the human interest angle. However, if I were an editor I would have a story about the tournament be about the tournament. Who is leading, how they became leader, the golf course, the crowd, etc., etc. Of course the fact that Woods is not doing well is news and belongs in the story. Then, I would run a separate, side story as to why Woods might be having difficulties if I thought that needed telling.
T obe honest, i’ve always found the Australian Olympic coverage to be just as egregious as the American when it comes to crappy human interest stories and crass parochialism.
Let me take this opportunity to repeat this mathematical gem from a story I read about a Kentucky-Tennessee basketball game: “Tennessee tied it at 73 on two free throws by C.J. Watson with 4:55 left, but the Vols couldn’t get any closer.”
They’re following a simple maxim: put the most important information at the top of the story and go in decreasing order of importance from there. You’re correct that it’s based on the assumption that your reader may not want to read the entire article, so you want to get the most relevant info out there at the start. It’s called Inverted Pyramid Structure and it’s probably taught at every journalism school out there. I tend to make my sports stories more feature-ish so I can avoid that structure for the exact reason you mention: ending in the middle has always bugged me and I prefer my stories to have real endings. But if I get to covering sports for a larger outlet, I’m sure I’ll have to follow that structure more often.
My complaint is that they aren’t following that structure in news reports. In addition to allowing the guy who rides the Long Island Railroad to work to get the news, it has another feature. If there isn’t room to include the whole write-up, the last paragraph can be dropped without losing anything much.
As I said. I think a news report about a golf tournament should be about the golf tournament and not the personal affairs of one of the participants.
This is exactly why they do it. There have been countless studies on how far into a story a print reader goes before moving on to the next. Eight column inches is the average (couldn’t find a link, sorry, but that is my recollection from 2001 or so), so if you save the final information (score, outcome, highlights) for the end, no one would ever read it. And it isn’t just sports stories that are written this way.
I understand your complaint, I was just answering her question. Obviously they feel that Tiger Woods is bigger than the individual tournament, and I can understand why that would annoy an actual fan of golf.
To be fair, I agree entirely with you. I think it’s much worse than it was 25 years ago… certainly the American networks pioneered the trend, but the trend they pioneered proved to be very profitable and the Australian networks are just as jingoistic as anywhere in the world nowadays. There’s a reason why reality TV is everywhere these days, after all.
As for the written word, I find the only well written articles these days are longer multi-page articles in magazines like Time or Vanity Fair or stuff like that.
The other part is that if you’re writing for the wire services (the Associated Press is the most well known, but there are others), editors at individual papers may not have room for your entire story. Thus, most any wire story is written so it can be cut at nearly any paragraph (after the first few), and still make sense.
It’s not just the wire services. They did it at every newspaper at which I was employed, ranging in size from 10,000 to 110,000 circulation. Reporters are taught to write in “pyramid” style so that stories can be easily cut from the bottom up. Otherwise, we editors and designers would lose our minds.
Unfortunately, ads decide news hole, not the quality of or interest in a story.
Heh. I’m not so sure that this is a new phenomenon.
My grandfather was a funeral director back in the time when that meant that he was also the local ambulance service. Grampa Ben was also a Captain in the fire-police, deputy this and assistant that for the town (Monticello, New York, if you’re curious). He would always tell me about how bad newspaper reporting is and was. He favorite line was something to the order of:
Yes but that’s a different question. When you see how a big newspaper is assembled you wonder that they get as much right as they do. My complaint is that the writing is often done like a novel or a short story. That is, building to a climax at or near the end. That’s backward for news writing.
Because of his obsessed following and the desire of news outlets to cater to it, Tiger Woods is the main story in all tournaments in which he competes (the others don’t really matter). That said, it’s not much of a basis on which to generalize about newspaper writing.
You might be correct, but I don’t think the Tiger Woods deal is a good example. Golf is still a pretty obscure sport (compared to the big 3 of Football, Basketball, Baseball) in the US, and most Americans don’t know anything about golf except Tiger Woods. As a golf fan, I find that infuriating, but that’s just the way it is. Who the hell ever heard of Stephen Ames? I barely know much about him, and I watch golf the time. It’s got to a bummer for the other guys-- no matter who’s winning, the headlines are always about how Tiger is doing. And in women’s golf it’s even worse, because Michelle Wie hasn’t even won an LPGA tournament yet, and she’s given the Tiger treatment even more than Tiger gets.
Last week the sports section of the San Jose Mercury News ran a story out of the SF Giants training camp, about one the Giants’ starting pitchers – and misspelled the pitcher’s name in the headline.
And in a story last year (also in the sport section) they used “kwanzaa” when they meant “quonset”.
So I’m surprised to hear that the job title of “editor” still exists.
