And more honest, too. If you think that these reflections are leading to a rousing reaffirmation of the old pyramid news story, you would be wrong. As the linguist Georgia Green pointed out in a report several years ago to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the disjointed structure of the standard or traditional news story often makes it hard to understand. In imposing an order on a set of facts, the narrative technique is an effort to make stories more understandableand hence more interesting. That's all to the good.
Journalism badly needs clarity.
We mislead our readers, however, when in the name of producing an interesting story we superimpose an arbitrary order on an incomplete selection of facts and present it as the realityas the what that happened. That is not a reality upon which journalists should act. It is the way novelists and short story writers produce their realities about the human condition, but the last time I checked, we, as journalists, were still supposed to be about nonfiction. William F. Woo, a 1967 Nieman Fellow, was a reporter and editor for 39 years before retiring as editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1996. Since then he has taught journalism in the Department of Communication of Stanford University.