5 ms·
In print journalism, you're supposed to include information in descending order of importance. As a reader, you're expected to stop reading once you get to det
by kd5bjo 12y ago
In print journalism, you're supposed to include information in descending order of importance. As a reader, you're expected to stop reading once you get to details you don't really care about, confident that you won't miss something more important buried farther down.
- jawns 12y agoThat's largely true for hard news stories. But what about news feats or op-eds or sports profiles, where the traditional inverted pyramid structure isn't employed?
- apozem 12y agoExactly. Feature stories often use a delayed lead to set the scene or catch the reader's attention.
- dredmorbius 12y agoWhile I can understand the arguments for this, in practice the approach frustrates me to no end. Worse are authors whose writing has no excerptable lede. Gina Kolata and mumber Morgenstern (health / Well articles in the NY Times) especially do this. I find some old-school journos -- Dan Gilmore particularly comes to mind, I've called out a few others in G+ posts -- still practice strong ledes and heads. Many newer ones start with "My latest at <some website somewhere> read more". Which ... tells me fucking nothing. Lede with your lede. Trail with your link or call-to-action.
- rafekett 12y agothis seems to be a lost art, unfortunately.
- dredmorbius 12y agoThe so-called "inverted pyramid". I'm finding it applied less and less frequently. I've also noted that it's become pretty much standard practice for news bureaus to write single-sentence paragraphs. Literally, every sentence of a story is its own paragraph. I don't know when that became standard practice, but sometime in the later 1990s or 2000s, particularly as stories moved online.
- ganeumann 12y agoZinsser mentions this one sentence paragraph thing in "How to Write Well", citing an AP article from 1993. (In the "Paragraphs" section of Chapter 10.)
- dredmorbius 12y agoThanks. And yes, it makes sense that it would be AP style or similar.
- mpclark 12y agoSadly, hardly anyone writing now outside big traditional media orgs has done any sort of formal journalism training.
- dredmorbius 12y agoThat's ... not all bad. I think there's too much insularity within much of the journo community. But many of the newcomers are also subject to outside influences which call their credibility strongly into question. Lack of uniform copyediting, for better or worse, means a wide range of writing quality. Though I'm seeing that even in long-standing brands -- NY Times, Forbes, and elsewhere.