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I read that news uses a pyramid structure where they say the main point first, then increasingly elaborate for anyone who cares enough to continue reading. Howe
by gentleman11 6y ago
I read that news uses a pyramid structure where they say the main point first, then increasingly elaborate for anyone who cares enough to continue reading. However, news is also famous for people only reading the headlines, and skipping the body of an article. It seems good for conveying information but bad for engagement (although some papers and magazines ramble for pages and you never find out what the article is even about because it’s 70% tangent and human interest)
- ghaff 6y agoStrict inverted pyramid style was so that newspapers could basically randomly cut an article when they ran out of space in the hole the article was filling. A bit of an oversimplification but almost literally true in the case of wire service copy. Also you lost people at jumps. Magazines are on longer deadlines and can adopt varying styles. That's not to say you hide the lede in the last paragraph, but you do have more flexibility in getting to the point. The Economist, which actually calls itself a newspaper, probably is roughly inverted pyramid but not as much as AP copy would be.
- peter303 6y agoThe NYTimes has these endless articles where you scroll 20-30 pages before reaching the end. Fortunately they have added "takeaway" articles where they summarize the five most important points of a long story.