Inverting the Inverted Pyramid
By: Cody Wiesner
Tags: Journalism, Writing, Editing, News, Writing Tips

Rules in writing have been a question of inquiry since the early 1980s, thanks to teachers and scholars in writing studies who believed that written drafts should emphasize process, not product. This is where writing provides an opportunity to discover one’s own identity and writing processes.

Confounding this existential process are rules. Particularly, writing process theorist Mike Rose’s 1980 contributions to the field have helped push the face of academic writing away from rigid expectations and toward an individualized process of discovering one’s unique writing style, approach, and intended audience. He’s one of the many scholars we have to thank for the modern writing classroom, where teachers and students regularly question what makes established writing conventions “good” or “bad” to oust dogmas and bring in fresh talent.

However, for all the variety and impact these developments have allowed for students and scholars of academic writing and the new wave of news and lifestyle blogging, traditional journalism has been slow to change. It’s why the frankly awful “inverted pyramid” style of news reporting somehow manages to stick around amid digital publishing. But why is that?

Journalistic writing, more specifically hard news, grapples with the unique challenge of keeping up with fast publication cycles. Weekly and daily cycles make writing secondary to finding and interviewing sources. At the same time, print news demands short-form articles to keep production costs low and the broadest possible audience engaged. On average, readers spent 2.32 minutes per news article in 2018. As a result, news media have historically made a compromise: the inverted pyramid.

Christopher Schwartz / Wikimedia

This structural rule in journalism asserts that to maximize readership, the most critical information goes at the top of the article. Usually, readers get the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the story right in the first paragraph, which tends to be 26 words or fewer. And if that isn’t possible, all the main points should be wrapped up by the second paragraph or “nut graf.” The remaining paragraphs get increasingly less important until the article reaches the required word count and unceremoniously ends. Meanwhile, rarely is a graf more than two sentences long. According to Horst in an article in Journalism Studies, this fine-tuned system not only compensates for the fact that most readers will stop reading early on in the article, but it also simplifies revision since copy editors can cut paragraphs from the bottom of an overly long story without being “obliged to undertake a time-consuming comprehensive reading of the text.” It can be a godsend if you only have a few minutes to copyedit a breaking news story before it has to go to layout. As Neilsen wrote in 1996, even after the dial-up modem crowed thrice and pre-internet journalists proclaimed the end of the inverted pyramid and the start of writerly flexibility as e-publishing infinity-length articles became a thing, the pyramid lived on. The great pyramid, practical but limiting, had cheated death. The outcomes of these writing rules were profound: whether you’re a reader, writer, or editor, the solution remained to read less.

Despite technological changes that allowed for more freedom and emerging writing formats like the inverted screw and the martini glass, the inverted pyramid lives prominently to this day. It’s due nearly as much to the tight deadlines and print/online-simultaneous articles that hadn’t gone away as the media being set in their ways. These proponents of the pyramid see it as the best, or least, the most practical way to achieve the cardinal goal of news: to inform. To their credit, frontloading the most vital information in succinct headlines and higher-up sentences is a way to do that, but simply informing the audience is just one aspect of what makes an article good or impactful. An article that imparts facts about a newsworthy event and delivers them in a compelling way that makes the reader care is the difference between a piece that informs versus one that informs well. Strong, original writing is crucial to this process. While great reporters across the industry have worked within the pyramid’s boundaries, the inherent limitations that underlie this structure are an active detriment to impactful, audience-grabbing writing.

Media outlets deciding not to published expanded content for web in a nutshell. Tima Miroshnichenko / Pexels

The rules instituted in news writing may play a restricting role in our writing processes and, ultimately, the quality and impact of our published work. In his 1981 study on rigid rules in writing processes, Mike Rose devoted one paragraph to this phenomenon, which he coined as “Set,” or a set of rules writers use that “bring certain methodological orientations with them.” In other words, different disciplines have different rules that bring about unique sets of writerly goals. Rose introduces a compelling question about rules on a micro-level. Still, in his specialized look at the effect of rigid rules on the individual writer, his study mostly overlooks the larger phenomenon of “rule-setting by discipline” and the complications it can cause to the writing process on a wide scale.

But what about disciplines where writers cannot choose to avoid following rules rigidly? This can be explained within the differences in practices between academic and journalistic writing, where disciplines that enforce rules stricter and more rigidly like journalism allow much less freedom. In Flower and Hayes’ landmark 1980 study on the cognitive process theory of writing, they determined that writers mentally generate goals based on structure, content, and audience, which determine what gets written. Rose argued rules that are followed too rigidly “impede [writers’] writing process” and confound the natural mental process of personal-goal setting, often leading to writer’s block or, worse, uninteresting writing. The delivery of a topic, audience, idea generation, structure and organization, and revision are all pre-decided for the news reporter, leading to almost no room for originality. The cost is tens of thousands of articles across the past several decades, which are structurally identical. Most written work becomes lost in the noise, unable to create identities outside news events they feature, and fail to deliver the news in original ways, limiting the odds that audiences will read all the way through. When the potential for structural originality is unavailable, print journalism loses the potential for impact.

While one cannot deny that the inverted pyramid has helped news cycles run more smoothly, whether proponents are correct that the pyramid informs the audience beyond a superficial level is questionable. Captivating writing usually comes with the hook, some sort of narrative progression to keep the writer actively invested in the writing throughout. Still, as Bruce DeSilva argues in an editorial in Nieman Reports, “the inverted pyramid makes endings impossible.” Due to the rigid rule of written content becoming less and less important with each subsequent paragraph, “most newspaper stories dribble pitifully to an end,” DeSilva writes. “Often they don’t really have endings at all.” Based on this structure’s rules, an article with a significant ending cannot be called an inverted pyramid, per its definition.

This structure may be effective at informing readers on a basic level. Still, a deeper understanding of a news event requires reading beyond the first few grafs. As DeSilva argues, this is a reading process for which the inverted pyramid is not well equipped. In their goal of keeping a largely inattentive audience engaged, media writers often sacrifice comprehensiveness and long-term impact, ironically increasing the odds that readers will read the headline and sometimes the lede graf, leaving as quickly as they came. Thus, the inverted pyramid often fails not only at making an impact but also informing the public. The rigid rules in print media are making news articles worse.

Hadi Slash / Pexels

To further demonstrate the incongruence between the rules of inverted pyramid structure and long-term audience engagement, I decided to look to the best in the industry: Pulitzer Prize nominees and recipients. In hard news coverage, these industry leaders include reporters from media outlets who “adhere to the highest journalistic principles.” According to the Pulitzer board, coverage in breaking news reporting is award-worthy if it not only “captures events accurately,” but also “illuminates” and “expands upon the initial coverage.” If a news outlet wins the Pulitzer, it means their articles covering an event profoundly impacted a jury of judges and news audiences at large.

This begs the question: Are the leading experts in the industry who have been nominated for achieving journalistic impact following the rigid rule structures of news expected of the greater industry, or are they making exceptions for the sake of more interesting writing? To find out, I conducted an informal study, looking at 50 random articles from finalists or winners of the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting between 2012 and 2019. For each article, I looked at whether the piece adhered to standard inverted pyramid conventions (short leads that comprehensively covers the five Ws and one H and descending order of importance), tallying “yes” or “no” for each case. To avoid bias, I didn’t look closely at headlines since they might have revealed the piece’s tone.

The results weren’t surprising: 69.4% of articles bucked inverted pyramid conventions compared to the 30.6% that followed the rules to the letter. The rule-breakers usually opted to distribute the five Ws and H across two to five paragraphs. For many articles, the full story wasn’t revealed until the end of the piece, requiring the audience to read the entire work for full context. My informal study seems to have revealed that the best writers appear primarily interested in telling stories, even if that breaks long-held conventions. But if that’s the case, I have to ask: If pieces that distort or forgo the inverted pyramid are winning awards, why are we so strongly emphasizing the inverted pyramid in newsrooms and classrooms? If the writing quality is top-notch, and the writer is well-established, rule-breaking may occur. But for most writers, variety is discouraged to keep up with editorial demands and the publication cycle. Often, reporters who rely too much on rule-breaking stories in their portfolios risk losing job offers for not displaying the expected hard skills. If emerging formats are captivating readers and earning clout for the publication, is it worth it to take a step back from the inverted pyramid, even if that slows the publication cycle down and demands slightly more attention from readers?

A new solution is needed to improve the efficacy of news writing, and this can be achieved by replacing old rules with better ones. Fortunately, many exist and are actively used by industry professionals. The inverted screw, for instance, retains the philosophy that the most important information comes at the top, but according to University of Oklahoma professor Edward J. Smith, information that comes after “rejects … that news story information is readily rankable with respect to importance.” Under this structural model, writers have more room to tell a compelling story while still compensating for those who stop reading early. And if that inverted screw becomes a martini glass, articles can also build to a climax. Editors would need to cut from the middle. This is already common in feature stories, though contrary to the long-held assumptions, summarized by Horst, that editors should “cut from the bottom” of news stories to “avoid comprehensive reading of the text.” The hasty deletion of paragraphs may cause serious clarity and transition concerns, requiring the editor to comprehensively (but efficiently) read copy no matter what.