Nitpick: What has happened to the inverted pyramid structure of news stories?

In My Humble Opinion
1

*If nitpickiness bothers you, suggest you skip this. However, if you’re my kind of people, please have a seat right here by me. *

Traditionally, news articles have been written to be top-heavy, with the most important details given right away and less important details farther down. This was so the story could be cut from the bottom up without losing the meat of it.

I know feature articles have not necessarily been written this way–they are written in a narrative style… but holy crap. I see a headline that looks interesting and start reading, hoping for the punch line somewhere near the top and read and read… now I have to scroll down, down, down or go to another page and often give up before I get to the point.

Has anyone else noticed this?

I read a lot of publications online than also have a physical version-- the New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, Christian Science Monitor-- and I’m seeing this phenomenon a lot. Presumably they’re feature-heavy so I guess they think it is permissible to meander to the point or build to a climax or something. But geez, when you’re reading on your device, it would be nice to find out what the headline means before you have to scroll through hundreds of words.

Even in my local newspaper (I’ve started taking the paper version again after a hiatus of 15 years), there is a headline today: **“More Freshmen Aim to Stay at [name of local university].” **

I wanted the opening paragraph to explain the headline, along the lines of:

or something like that. When I read that headline, I want to know right away WHY the students are arriving as freshmen and choosing to stay for four years and graduate. Why? Because I’m connected with a community college and there may be some things we can adapt.

But the article starts with “Mary Lou Jones” (made up name) and how her friend and family urged her to go to a Big Name out-of-state school and she decided to enroll here. The next paragraph defines some terms. Then I turn to an inside page and I STILL haven’t found out WHY these students are deciding to come here and stay here and graduate.

It turns out that the reason-- finally located in the last 1/3 of the article, on page 6-- is that this college has a boatload of scholarship money to hand out and it’s keeping students around. So why couldn’t the opening paragraph have read:

THEN I’d like to read about Mary Lou and her experience, now that I have some frame of reference. :smack:

Who is editing this crap anyway?

This happens in the fancy-schmancy publications I cited above, too. Intriguing headline, but I have to plow through thousands of words to get to the point. You don’t have to give away everything in the first paragraph, but don’t make me scroll, click (or physically turn) to the next page/screen, and the next and the next to find out what the freakin’ headline was referring to.

As a grant proposal writer for 35 years, I have learned to get to the point immediately and then give the backup and supporting information after you’ve told them what you want them to know. Otherwise, *people stop reading. *

2

Journalism is dead. We now have Media Writing. This is, er, news?
The basic principle in journalism writing is to put the most important fact/summary first, then work backwards until the last paragraphs are the least consequential. The idea is/was that a newspaper editor could cut the story by paragraphs to fit, losing only proportionate elements of the report. To put the important fact or facts deep in the story is “burying the lede.”

Journalism writing has pretty much been replaced with a form that keeps dragging the reader through clicks - as many as possible - and even the most august journals have started doing it. That style has backtracked to print journalism as well, meaning that those of us who read newspapers have a decreasing spiral of reasons to keep doing so.

Long-form, feature journalism is a little different, though. Take as an example those 15-20k word articles that appear in The New Yorker. (You tend to find yourself three pages into them before you realize you went from the short stuff to the centerpiece, and have 21 more pages to go. I hate that.) Many of those change direction multiple times, like a short book, and have major elements appear very deeply within. More than one goes on at regular length in one direction about, say, election fraud, and then turns to a completely different and primary direction. Sometimes they do that twice.

Those aren’t newspaper or daily journalism - they’re investigative or feature writing. Not subject to the lede-2nd item-3rd item-fluff-fluff-fluff model.

But these days it’s Media Writing all the way down, fuggit.

3

This is the first thing I thought of. The financial model of Internet journalism is to maximize page loads to collect as much banner ad revenue as reasonably possible. So the first page is really only a teaser, “click here for page 2!”. If they can put the punch line on page 3 or 4, they can get even more money from people desperate enough to really want to know what the point of the article was.

4

Straight inverted pyramid was fading before online news consumption was a thing.
It’s extremely practical for an editor when he had a strip of type to have pasted into a hole so you don’t have to a composing room guy with an Xacto blade trim lines and paragraphs out in the middle. But when you’re doing the layout on a screen it isn’t harder to edit from the middle.
And at least in the 80s and 90s when I was in journalism the research was saying people didn’t enjoy reading inverted pyramid.
They liked a narrative style much better and were more likely to read a story written in that format.

5

To reference another recent thread, I am absolutely shocked at how many sites have gone to piles of worthless clickbait - it seems like every story I call up from Google News is to a third rate semi-journalism site that then fills the page with egregious, lurid teasers. It used to be rare and avoidable, and now it’s the mainstream. Even relatively sober, upscale sites have gone to sidebars of this sucky shit.

6

I know the debate. There’s a fine line between writing in hard reportese to a hard structure, and turning news into “readable” stories (translation: dumbed down and softened, when not intended to lure readers below the fold… the original “clickbait”).

Nothing excuses journalists from doing their jobs, but nearly all publications now issue a free pass that let them exercise the skills formerly expended on the novel in the desk drawer. We all lose, in so many ways. “Moscow in flames; missiles headed for New York; film at eleven” used to be funny, before pretty much all news got broken up to force more turns, waits through ad blocks and clicks.

7

I’m not going to bother unless I know where I’m going. There are too many stories competing for my attention.

I don’t mind a narrative style as long as I know what the point is up front. Tell me what you want me to know and then tell me how you got there and back that up with supporting anecdotes. If I want to wander through the unknown looking for clues, I’ll read a murder mystery.

8

This has infuriated me so much that I’ve quit even reading the news. Paragraph after paragraph doing nothing but quoting witnesses and prosecutors and defense attorneys all wringing their hands, and (maybe, if any reporter asked any questions at all) about ten or twenty paragraphs down, a buried zinger that actually explains the nitty gritty, which really amounted to nothing at all. All following a lead that so-and-so “could face up to” twenty years in prison, if convicted and given the maximum sentence for every separate charge on the prosecutor’s gleeful bloat sheet.

Nearly all news now is just press releases, reworked by somebody familiar with the style guide. The subliminal mantra of all reportage nowadays is that news is cheaper and easier to make than to find, and news is a branch of the for-profit entertainment industry…

9

Am I the only one who thought this was about an actual upside down pyramid building being reported on? I’ll see myself out.

10

You missed the point, sad to say.

11

Exactly. And it made sense that it was fading, because in the 1980’s and 1990’s few people were using print media for updates on breaking stories. Television and radio were more immediate.

But guess what, the world changed, and now people are reading the news again. Handheld devices are faster, easier, and more ubiquitous than radio or TV.

But still, we get online news stories written as ponderous features, as if we were reading a dead-tree newspaper circa 1985. Bring back the inverted pyramid!

12

And this is closer to academic writing, which a lot of people are more familiar with nowadays. Start off with an abstract of your findings (The Podunk Mall was blown up by terrorists!), then provide sections about the history of the mall, the history of the applicable terrorist movement, how the linkage was discovered, details of the damage, pictures of the bodies, and quotations from notable politicians as to how his incident will likely affect public policy. Don’t make me wade through three pages of “You’ll never guess what happened at Podunk Mall!” crap.

13

MY PEOPLE!! Y’all get it. Thank you.

14

“Dead.
That’s what he was when the police showed up.”

  • James Thurber, when challenged by an editor to produce an attention-getting lead.
15

Just like here on SDMB, I often follow a “two-click rule”: If the story is rambling and doesn’t get to the point by the time I’m two clicks into it (or two paragraphs), my next click will often be on that little “x” in the upper right corner.

I’ve generally gotten the impression that writers think they should keep you in suspense, meandering all around the point, telling long drawn-out anecdotes, etc. (i.e., “burying the lede”), all before getting to the point, just to stoke up your curiosity and keep you reading.

Others posters above have noted a reason for the rule, from the editors’ point of view: So the editor can cut paragraphs from the end without trashing the story.

I see it from the readers’ point-of-view: I start reading a story with a certain level of interest, and if the story doesn’t get to the point within a certain number of column-inches, my interest is spent and I won’t read any more of it. And if the writer really does tell the whole story in the first paragraph, like proper journalism should, then I may or may not read beyond that. I want stories to be written so I have that option.

16

You could get that, I’m sure.

… And then the site’s advertisers will pull out and the site will shut down or convert to clickbait.

17

Does that apply to The Atlantic, Esquire, the Christian Science Monitor? I’m seeing a woeful lack of editing even in those esteemed publications.

18

The recent number of egregious errors on the front page of the NYT tell the tale. Journalism has been on a downward spiral for a while, accelerated by the demands and possibilities (mostly shortcuts) of online. It was inevitable that the slovenly standards of the blogosphere and twitbook would crawl up into higher and higher levels of public writing and reporting.

Most newspapers have “flopped” by now, being printed copies of what’s written for their websites. So the meandering, fun, feature-ish entertainment style used to drag online readers past as many ads as possible has replaced the reporting style.

“I weep for the species” - Preed

19

I don’t think it’s a time problem. I think it’s that younger editors (probably anyone under about 50-ish) didn’t get a proper foundation of grammar in school. They weren’t made to diagram sentences, they weren’t made to study Latin in high school, they weren’t made to write-write-write out long papers and book reports. We did a lot of writing all through elementary school and high school. And our teachers corrected and critiqued our work. That rigorous foundation has stood me in good stead through 38 years of grant proposal writing.

My exBF’s daughters got through high school without ever having to write a paper. They created PowerPoint presentations instead. They missed out on developing an important and useful skill.

20

As far as I can tell, all news of all types have become allergic to facts.

Interviewer: Obama might be an alien lizard. What do you think?
Panel Member 1: I think it’s obvious that he is. The French are all cheese-eaters, and they like him.
Panel Member 2: Clearly that’s not true. I voted for Obama, so he can’t be an alien lizard.
Interviewer [Fox version]: There you have it. Obama is an alien lizard.
Interviewer [MSNBC version]: There you have it. Obama is is not an alien lizard.
Interviewer [CNN version]: There you have it. Obama has been racially discriminated against.