6 ms·

man... this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written. Good news articles should tell you everything in the headline. Then tell y

man... this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written. Good news articles should tell you everything in the headline. Then tell you everything again in the first body sentence. Then tell you everything again in the first paragraph. and the first page. And so on. It's supposed to be a fractal that unfolds additional detail as you press forward, while ensuring that even a casual reader comes away with a mostly complete and accurate understanding of the issue. More of THAT please.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid", and it's supposed to be the gold standard of journalistic writing. IIRC it's being taught as part of vocational education. And yet, news media are the last place you're likely to find articles written in this style. Somehow, they manage to deliver the exact opposite of what they should be. A fractal of confusion, recursively unfolding noise. (It's as if they were making a lot of money on maximizing the time a reader is engaged with any given article. It's as if - and I know this sounds crazy - the articles were there just to hold the user down, while they're being exposed to something else...)
- rcoveson 5y ago
  > Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid"... Narrow (succinct) at the top and broad (detailed) at the bottom seems like a normal pyramid to me. An "inverted pyramid" would be like one of those poems that describes fine details first and only in the last sentence reveals what it's been describing. I don't doubt that it's actually called that, but it seems backwards to me.
  - Angostura 5y ago
    Yeh, it's simply called pyramid structure.
  - thatcat 5y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism... It is ordered most relevant to least.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Thank you. The other replies made me worried my memory is failing me.
- saurik 5y ago
  Wired is a magazine, not a newspaper: it doesn't exist to quickly present information every day, but to provide entertaining writing once a month; insisting it use an inverted pyramid is as strange as arguing that if only movies and books just led with the resolution, it would save you a lot of time.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Any publication still competes for attention. Practices which show contempt for the reader's time and interest are ultimately counterproductive.
- Angostura 5y ago
  Its 'pyramid structure', not inverted. It was used in newspapers for two reasons. The first is because, yes it allows busy readers to access the most salient facts first. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly from the point of print newspaper production, it allowed subs to always cut from the bottom, without having to read the whole piece carefully... Newspapers would go through several editions throughout the night as new stories came in or existing stories were expanded. What started life as a front page lead might find itself moved to page three and progressively shortened, possibly down to a 1 sentence news-in-brief NIB. The pyramid style let subs always fit a story into the available space, simply by cutting everything progressively from the bottom. This story in Wired is not a news story and is not written as a news story. It is a feature story and its construction follows different rules. It's a very good feature story, in my opinion.
jerf 5y ago
"this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written." I'm not accusing you of doing this on purpose, but there's a certain amount of equivocation in the phrase "news article" there. Yes, that's a style that is recommended for factual news articles in a newspaper context, but that's not the only form of "news article". Call this a "news essay" instead and give it its own style and it might make more sense. It's been around for a long time. Could call it the 20th-century equivalent of clickbait and probably not be far off. "There's an exciting revolutionary change to physics coming... but first, the full life story of the thesis advisor's influential father... keep reading...." Arguably it's more a form of entertainment than information.
- hobs 5y ago
  Sure, but most of the content they are writing is neither entertaining or engaging, its long and wandering and I couldn't care less. No novel is allowed to lollygag around the point its trying to achieve in the way these articles flagrantly waste your time. It's like someone misunderstood that the act of moving your eyes along the page is not interesting in and of itself.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    >No novel is allowed to lollygag around the point its trying to achieve in the way these articles flagrantly waste your time. With barely less than a second's though: Watership Down, a hugely popular novel in the 1970s, spends untold amounts of text/paper immersed in detailed descriptions of the flora that the characters are moving through or eating. Why not just say "I don't enjoy this style of writing", rather than trying to come up with some supposedly objective metrics for how other people should write?
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      There is lollygagging in irrelevancies, and luxuriating in details. The distinction can be quite arbitrary, but it usually does stand out. Herman Melville and Neal Stephenson also come to mind. In nonfiction, John McFee.
yboris 5y ago
I suspect that doing the opposite helps trap people on the page, resulting in more money going to advertisers. If all the info is at the top, who will scroll lower (and see more ads)?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid", and it's supposed to be the gold standard of journalistic writing. IIRC it's being taught as part of vocational education. And yet, news media are the last place you're likely to find articles written in this style. Somehow, they manage to deliver the exact opposite of what they should be. A fractal of confusion, recursively unfolding noise. (It's as if they were making a lot of money on maximizing the time a reader is engaged with any given article. It's as if - and I know this sounds crazy - the articles were there just to hold the user down, while they're being exposed to something else...)

rcoveson 5y ago
> Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid"... Narrow (succinct) at the top and broad (detailed) at the bottom seems like a normal pyramid to me. An "inverted pyramid" would be like one of those poems that describes fine details first and only in the last sentence reveals what it's been describing. I don't doubt that it's actually called that, but it seems backwards to me.
- Angostura 5y ago
  Yeh, it's simply called pyramid structure.
- thatcat 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism... It is ordered most relevant to least.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Thank you. The other replies made me worried my memory is failing me.
saurik 5y ago
Wired is a magazine, not a newspaper: it doesn't exist to quickly present information every day, but to provide entertaining writing once a month; insisting it use an inverted pyramid is as strange as arguing that if only movies and books just led with the resolution, it would save you a lot of time.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Any publication still competes for attention. Practices which show contempt for the reader's time and interest are ultimately counterproductive.
Angostura 5y ago
Its 'pyramid structure', not inverted. It was used in newspapers for two reasons. The first is because, yes it allows busy readers to access the most salient facts first. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly from the point of print newspaper production, it allowed subs to always cut from the bottom, without having to read the whole piece carefully... Newspapers would go through several editions throughout the night as new stories came in or existing stories were expanded. What started life as a front page lead might find itself moved to page three and progressively shortened, possibly down to a 1 sentence news-in-brief NIB. The pyramid style let subs always fit a story into the available space, simply by cutting everything progressively from the bottom. This story in Wired is not a news story and is not written as a news story. It is a feature story and its construction follows different rules. It's a very good feature story, in my opinion.

jerf 5y ago

"this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written." I'm not accusing you of doing this on purpose, but there's a certain amount of equivocation in the phrase "news article" there. Yes, that's a style that is recommended for factual news articles in a newspaper context, but that's not the only form of "news article". Call this a "news essay" instead and give it its own style and it might make more sense. It's been around for a long time. Could call it the 20th-century equivalent of clickbait and probably not be far off. "There's an exciting revolutionary change to physics coming... but first, the full life story of the thesis advisor's influential father... keep reading...." Arguably it's more a form of entertainment than information.

hobs 5y ago
Sure, but most of the content they are writing is neither entertaining or engaging, its long and wandering and I couldn't care less. No novel is allowed to lollygag around the point its trying to achieve in the way these articles flagrantly waste your time. It's like someone misunderstood that the act of moving your eyes along the page is not interesting in and of itself.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  >No novel is allowed to lollygag around the point its trying to achieve in the way these articles flagrantly waste your time. With barely less than a second's though: Watership Down, a hugely popular novel in the 1970s, spends untold amounts of text/paper immersed in detailed descriptions of the flora that the characters are moving through or eating. Why not just say "I don't enjoy this style of writing", rather than trying to come up with some supposedly objective metrics for how other people should write?
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    There is lollygagging in irrelevancies, and luxuriating in details. The distinction can be quite arbitrary, but it usually does stand out. Herman Melville and Neal Stephenson also come to mind. In nonfiction, John McFee.

yboris 5y ago

I suspect that doing the opposite helps trap people on the page, resulting in more money going to advertisers. If all the info is at the top, who will scroll lower (and see more ads)?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]