Topple the Inverted Pyramid

All the students of journalism, media research and communication are taught about the inverted pyramid structure of a news story (wikipedia).

The pyramid structure means that each news story should be constructed in a way that the most important information is served first in the headline and in the ingress and the least important information consisting of background details is positioned in the end of the story.

There are two reasons why this structure is appreciated. First reason is that the reader can stop reading the news piece at any point knowing that nothing more important will be missed. Second reason is that the maker-up or editor in print newspaper can cut the end of the story without having to rewrite the whole piece.

Naturally, the second reason is becoming less and less important with the growing importance of digital content. But I claim the first reason isn't really a reason at all. It's just what we have been told in order to make the editors' job easier.

The narrative structured will vanish from the news slowly but inevitably.

This will finally happen when the paradigm shift from click based headline worship changes to time based monetizing models. This change is going on as we speak. Newspapers haven't in large quantities yet realized that it is much easier to keep a person on one page than to try to keep her surfing inside one specific news site but they are slowly getting it.

Currently, the inverted pyramid is already broken, as the headline tends to serve as a curiosity trap by not revealing any information. But when the stories get their income from time spent instead of clicks and longform becomes much more reasonable to produce even for free (as beer) delivery, the inverted pyramid becomes obsolete. Time based metrics will make the inverted pyramid strictly a bad business decision.

A journalist might feel bad about this, claiming that the inverted pyramid is good for the reader. I don't agree. The Inverted Pyramid is not a natural structure for narration. A well structured narrative with anticipation and a buildup tells the whole story. It links individual events together and puts the whole story in the context. Check for example this brilliant piece: Emergency situation for Sergei Shoigu

We don't need news content to deliver information quickly. Headlines are for that (pretty please...). We need journalism to connect the dots. This is the power of a story.

Journalists: forget the inverted pyramid. Start writing stories. That is what you love, anyway.

Image Credit: Derek Key