Inverted Pyramid Style (Some Context)

“...With the din of a thousand voices ringing in my ears, the revelation was born. And it was, as often is the case, by a Provocateur.” Chicken Soup for the African-American Soul

“I was forced to examine what objectivity actually means, and I realized that in a situation such as the one in Bosnia, where you had ethnic cleansing -- genocide -- you have a duty to call it like it is and to tell the truth. Objectivity, in that regard, means giving all sides a fair hearing but never drawing a false moral equivalence. So, I called who were the aggressors and who were the victims, and I'm very, very proud of that now, because that was what we had to do. I think we did the right thing as journalists and eventually managed to be part of the reason that the world intervened.” Christiane Amanpour

The case for a shift in the technology, from the Newswire legacy to digital journalism, raising concerns about the relevancy and historical importance of the inverted pyramid style of hard news writing, is at once as vexed a question as it is largely a non-event. For every concern raised that tries to place the source for this change, or more appropriately, the loss of its economic legacy – because, that it would seem, is precisely what this worry is about - on the shoulders of such an easy and familiar mode of news writing, allows the real reasons for these concerns to go on escaping any meaningful understanding; of how the shift to digital technology has profoundly changed journalism. If such concerns want to lay blame solely with the loss of the pyramid style, then I would first ask why. Why all this worry over this writing style when it is clearly the traditional place for the hard news, as the once breaking source of the news event, along with the inverted pyramid style as well, that have both been displaced by the impact of digital technology on contemporary journalism?  

While the inverted pyramid is claimed to be the preferred style for the majority of stories in many papers, similarly, there is also a strong representation of alternate styles for writing up the news (Johnston 2007). Once the mainstay of the news section of newspapers, the inverted pyramid is now considered only one of many choices, alongside more creative, less structured narrative styles, informed by elements of fiction writing and more consistent with lengthier news feature styles (Vigo 2015b). Story strength, and not length, should still be the determining factor for determining when a story is to naturally finish, namely at the point at which further story details fails in meeting the criteria for newsworthiness, and not the ability of the inverted pyramid style to be cut down.

Where news differs between broadcast and print media, there is however the expectancy that in the case of the printed news story, details will be lengthier due to the expectation of the writer to present a ‘picture’ of events in words. As well, the amount of information included in the news will always vary depending on the medium used for reporting, and which is just as true today in our high-tech, 24hr news cycles, as it was in the past, at the birth of the inverted pyramid style, and news wire it was designed for (Vigo 2015a).

The inverted pyramid style is also an extremely good tool for organizing thinking and ideas onto paper, forcing writers to sum up their literary points and to think closely about how they want to present those ideas in their writing. Chip Scanlan (2003), notes that while the style may have been challenging in the beginning, “over time it became easier, and came to see that the form helped develop his powers of critical thinking, analysis, and synthesis, and which as he says, are the foundations of clarity in clear thinking. It only takes a quick Internet search to appreciate just how much the inverted pyramid style is still used today, as an important tool for setting out web pages with engaging texts.

Yet, despite all that is considered good about the inverted pyramid, to its critics it also remains the ‘anti-story’ - of telling the story backwards, and the reason that many consider is behind the loss of newspaper readerships. In some quarters, critiques for this argument have reached enmity levels as colourfully entertaining as they are presumably loathing. As if by using the form a writer is recalling the so-called ‘panicked collapse’ that heralded in the recent zombie⁠2 apocalypse across global cyberspace. “The inverted pyramid remains the Dracula of journalism.” Writes Bruce DeSilva of The Associated Press in one memorable phrase. “It keeps rising from its coffin and sneaking into the paper.” (DeSilva in; Scanlan 2003) In his defence of strong narrative endings, DeSilva maintains that the need to cut from the bottom of the story, intrinsically important in the days of stories sent by wire telegraph, is gone. “But most newspaper stories dribble pitifully to an end. This is the enduring legacy of the inverted pyramid” he exclaims – a form that “makes good endings impossible” (DeSilva 2007 in; Johnston 2007) Like others, he adds that the style never had anything to do with writing or reading of the news, and everything to do with the economics of transmitting news information across telegraph news wire easily and quickly, and that both reasons are now gone.

Others, such as George Brock and Mitchell Stephens (2014), suggest that what might be identified as the reason for the increased un-readability of stories and disengagement with readers, could well be a response to declining readerships which are demanding more entertainment and less straight information in their news-diets, and especially in the competitive and expanding media technology environment  - “That it is more likely to be seen as the fault of the readers, and not the media or the inverted style itself that is the problem” (Stephens 2014) In part, there may be some truth in this idea: as people make choices about where they read their news – in what form, rather than from what source – as the new technologies become common place and the more traditional news outlets disappear or are swallowed-up by larger competitors.

Arguing against market trends for the decline in readership, Davis Merrit (2013) suggests, “such comfortable rationalizations do not always withstand honest scrutiny”. The root of the problem for journalism, and the underlying issues over loss of readership has little to do with market dynamics. Competition and mergers, he claims, “are nothing new in any industry, and readership numbers for media consumption continue to grow at some of the highest rates on record.” Instead, he adds, the reason for the loss of critical readership willing to engage in intellectual debates lies in “the significance of [Journalism’s] detachment from the events and people it covers”. By championing “objectivity”, journalism has lost its social mission – to engage an interested readership in democratic debate⁠ – and in so doing, has set itself apart, from the people, and the community (the agora) it once spoke for. That in teaching journalist to be “fair and balanced” has forced the media into making ‘false equivalencies’, or media bias, which has led to bad journalism. (Merrit 2013)

Setting out his thesis in support of Public Journalism, Merrit is primarily in agreement with DeSilva, in reaffirming the idea that journalism and public life are inseparably bound. That through its obedience to the early philosophical framework set out by Walter Lippmann in his influential book, Public Opinion⁠, the source for many of journalism's contemporary problem they claim, are located.  For De Silva, the disconnection is situated in a decline of intellectual standards that started with the rise in popularity of the inverted pyramid style over lengthier narrative pieces - how the style has created an official intellectual regression in reader tastes; and for Merrit, the argument is broader. How journalism has lost touched with a public it now sees as inferior and itself as elite. What is now considered as newsworthy they claim, has given rise to a social phenomenon of an information spectacle and its readers as simply its spectators – and where news has become nothing more than entertainment – or, ‘infotainment.’ 

In recognising the disappearance of the intellectual nature in news content, both claim that through the rise public journalism a way forward for the profession has emerged; as it begins to re-connect with it central mission of engaging the public in civic life.  Yet for those professional journalists who do endeavour to put community first, they instead, are accused of “reporting the news they are creating” - that journalism must maintain a ‘pristine’ distance, a contrived indifference to outcomes, else the (commercial) news product be contaminated. (Merrit 2013)

For other still, much of the debate is unnecessary or overly complicated. More in line with a ‘no-nonsense’ work ethic of just getting on with the task of meeting newspaper deadlines this view suggests that such concerns are down to a simple dip in productivity. That a solution for overcoming lost revenues is just a matter of keeping pace with technological developments. An understanding carried over from the past: that in the old way of making the news there exists a kind of derivative quality associated with the success of the old style - both culturally and economically – and in order to find a suitable remedy it is just a matter of re-discovering the right formula for the old technological success to be seamlessly reapplied to new technology.

In trying to present arguments like DeSilva’s, which question the fitness of the literary worth of the inverted pyramid style, and not its appropriateness to do the job it was designed to do, in support of the ‘no-nonsense’ approach to the economic success once enjoyed by newspapers, shifts the debate from how best to write-up engaging news stories, from questions to do with the contemporary status of authorship over current events (Stephens 2014), and places it, not only at the feet of the changing technology, and the how best to make money again argument, but also in a kind of imaginary history that relies on a mythology of capitalist efficiency. That the economic legacy of the inverted pyramid style enabled a kind of robust enterprise culture for overcoming the tyranny of space and time for newsgathering. Intricately woven into the praxis of historical necessity and innovation, as well as practicality - for the news cannot be published if it is not written - such an approach begins by focusing on the way the miniaturised personal communications devices have inserted their own logic, specifically, in place of the lost revenues in creating the live, late breaking news cycle. An endless looping technology that has produced a “fragile industry battling a 'perfect storm' of falling circulations, reduced advertising revenue, rising print costs and the impact of 'citizen journalists' and free news aggregators”. (Brock 2013)

For Chips Scanlan, in his article: Birth of the Inverted Pyramid: A Child of Technology, and for others like him, DeSilva’s problem of a diminishing informed readership is simply an economic one. By attempting to conflate the historical circumstances behind the need to originally use the style as an economic one, he is suggesting, that by blueprinting those exact same conditions that previously saw to the inverted pyramid styles success - as an overlay on the contemporary media landscape - another more appropriate method, similar in effect to the inverted pyramid style itself, but suited to today’s media technologies may be conceived. “Economic pressure more than anything drove [this] new kind of writing that departed from the flowery language of the 19th century — it was concise, stripped of opinion and detail.” And it sold newspapers - that is his point.  How?  

Fuelling the shift in writing style was a new type of news organization, named the “Wire Service”.  Scanlan goes on to explain the influence the Age of Realism’s (1848) birth had on shaping and fusing the style with the new technology. However, in doing so, in trying to draw parallels between the two ages he misreads the zeitgeist for digitally: its immediacy or contiguity, and in particular the Multitude⁠ that it activates – or our collective experience of its presence everywhere as precisely anti-capitalism – by assuming that both the condition that produced the telegraph wire, and the inverted pyramid style remain part of the news reading experience today. That in both instances a celebration of progress, of the technical innovation of capital to over comes such limitations is at the centre of both historical moments when it was not.

This ‘time-worn’ association with ‘capitalist driven efficacy of the news industry, at best, was nothing more than the illusion the industry projected about the ordering and verification of facts into print copy before each deadline. Such a hurried ethos, if there is to be any truth to such a notion, was more likely to also have been a fabrication by the profession itself, than anything remarkable in the way newspapers were prepared for sale - including every situation we think we can associate with the busyness of a newsroom, to do with getting the paper out on the street by the next edition - as beating competitors and making a scoop.  Today, conditions for generating breaking news stories have undeniably changed from this once bustling and energetic workplace chaos, but the conditions that heralded in the inverted pyramid style can hardly be expected to exist today as part of a pinnacle of contemporary high-tech and high-stakes news environment. In the past, breaking news was anything but fast and the ‘immediacy’ or efficacy aspect that readers have come to associate today’s news events was in part just the illusion of compressed time between each update of the 24hr news cycle, as it was an aspect of popular television and film setting.

Writing for the Australian in: How Technology has Changed Journalism, Patrick Baume sets out a rather surprising time lines for the digital transformation of the news:

‘On August 30, 1999, when East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia the violence that quickly followed was covered solely by a few foreign correspondents on the ground who were trying to leave. The first television and newspaper reports could only focus on the breakdown of law and order that surrounded them as the journalists themselves fled the country. At the time, he contends, there were no mobile phone cameras, no blogs, and the news delivered through radio, television, and the newspapers was of deep confusion about unknown levels of violence.

Having no direct footage and no personal accounts “actually caused the coverage to dip in the first few days after the crises.”

Two year later, on September 11, 2001, the attack on The World Trade Centre was a televised event. Amateur footage did emerge days later, but the entire event was primarily a broadcast by professional television news crews to the planet. Yet despite even the proximity of some of the biggest and best news crews in America to the event, and the fact that the televised event itself was also attracting some of the highest viewer numbers on record, there was still a lot of confusion in the early breaking reports, were some journalist for instance, claimed the death toll was three times more than the final count and broadcast speculation about what was ‘really going on’ became was rampant. 

By 2004, however, on the Boxing Day Tsunami three-year later, problems of confusion with the media as it tried to assess the scale of the disaster had largely been overcome. Very early on, survivors and witnesses immediately began uploading personal video and photographic records of the disaster as it happened. Most ‘witness’ the event in its correct time sequence as the first images and footage of the earlier parts of the disaster were uploaded first. What appeared largely as a natural state of immediacy was for the very first time in the history of journalism a news event broadcast largely in real-time and in the correct sequence, as traditional media tried to keep up with the internet and long before they had processed and verified it. (Baume 2009)

From this point on, the news now not only appears ever-present but also our experiences of it are as personal as the photographic or video record made of a family Sunday afternoon barbecue. Speed, in the form of the global distributed network of personal media devices and not the inverted pyramid style itself, has had a significant effect on our ability at any moment to bring ourselves up to date with events happening live around the globe. While that may be the gift of the new technology, it must also be understood that it has not changed the structure of reporting and most importantly, has not changed the need to have events analysed in an informed and considered way.  

While personal pictures and footage may have an instantaneous impact on delivering us into the very precedence of an unfolding new event anywhere around the planet, to bring us up-today, to turn ourselves into another global witness of billions for a brief moment, the possibility to be confused and indeed traumatized remain just as important if not a profound consideration, of our global media experiences, and especially if in doing so we are in danger of forgetting that the most important problem is the real suffering of those pictured (Reinhardt 2012). While journalism needs to be rethought on a global scale and remade to meet the demands of new conditions” (Brock 2013) it need to remember that the media and especially news journalism and its delivery across vastly multiplying social media spaces is not the sum total of literary and intellectual experiences or engagement with knowledge paradigms, despite this ever-present and all-encompassing appearance. 

Books, films, theatre, music academia, libraries, art galleries and museums, food events, festivals, travel; communities and lastly, our daily engagement with our friends and family to name but a few, all can provide the same sorts of stimulus and depth that we think we perceive from the media and news.

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Reference Lists

Baume, P 2009, 'How technology is changing journalism ', The Australian,

Brock, G 2013, Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age, Kogan Page.

DeSilva, B 2007, 'Telling true stories', Endings, Plume,

Johnston, J 2007, 'Turning the inverted pyramid upside-down: How Australia print media is learning to love the Narrative,' Asia-Pacific Media Educator, vol. Article 2, no. 18, pp. 1-15.

Merrit, D 2013, Public Journalism and Public Life: Why Telling the News Is Not Enough, revised edn., Routledge, New York.

Reinhardt, M 2012, 'Painful Photographs: From the Ethics of Spectatorship to Visual Politics', in Ethics and images of P, Routledge, Hoboken.

Scanlan, C 2003, 'Writing from the Top Down: Pros and Cons of the Inverted Pyramid', News: Media Innovation, vol. 2014,

Smith, A & Aaker, J 2010, 'The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change', -08-20, p. 241.

Stephens, M 2014, 'Beyond News: The Future of Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review Books)', -02-04, p. 264.

Vigo, K 2015a, 'Content: The Body of the Story Page', 2015-OUI-PWR60004-Journalism (SP1), Learning Material on Blackboard, Swinburne University of Technology, viewed April 2015.

Vigo, KB, J Dr; Beasley, C DR 2015b, 'Feature writing', 2015-OUI-PWR60004-Journalism (SP1), Learning Material On Blackboard, Swinburne University of Technology,

Endnotes

1 Jane Johnston’s 2007 study, researching the frequency the inverted pyramid style in Australian newspapers. Concludes with: “While the findings clearly showed that the inverted pyramid was the preferred style for the majority of stories in these papers, there was nevertheless a strong representation of alternate styles of writing. “ …” the use of a narrative style in world news appeared to be quite high….” (Johnston 2007)

2 See “Subtext” in “Zombie”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie

3 “Lippmann – Dewey Debate” See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism#Role

4. Recently the term ‘Multitude’ has returned to prominence as a new model of resistance against global systems of power as described by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Wikipedia While not specifically referring to journalism but the larger concept of media Lippmann and Dewey’s idea of the elite vs the masses, or the ‘public’ in their idea of a democracy served by journalism.