Talk:Inverted pyramid (journalism)

message: "General Grant and his wife were advertised to be at the theatre this" may be a mistake, or an unexplained demonstration of a telegraph interruption. Badanedwa 08:17, Jun 21, 2004 (UTC)
:If you are suggesting the word "advertised" may be a mistake, in those days advance notices of the itineraries of public figures were printed ("advertised") in newspapers. Or if you mean the sentence is a fragment, I think the ... elipsis at the end is meant to show that in the original source the story continues, but only this much has been printed here. I think the final sentence in (the current brief version of) the article implies this: "The transitional sentence about the Grants suggests that less-important facts are being added to the rest of the story." -- Bricaniwi (talk) 01:05, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: quote

message: I deleted the sentence with Grant (see above) and the hourglass link, because the link did not refer to writing.
Maurreen 14:45, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks like the Grant sentence was added back, probably because it is referred to later: "The transitional sentence about the Grants suggests that less-important facts are being added to the rest of the story." -- Bricaniwi (talk) 01:05, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Deletions

message: The Lincoln story is hardly an inverted pyramid (as described in the rest of the article) but a chronological narrative. Indeed, the most important point (that the president is at death's door) is at the end.
On the matter of the metaphor, maybe news-style is better seen as a pyramid that's actually the right way up. The key facts (the point) are summarised briefly at the start. The detail, which gets less and less crucial and possibly more and more verbose, follows in declining order of importance.
www.danon.co.uk
:Please sign posts with four tildes so they are timestamped.
:I agree the Lincoln story is not as lean or tight a summary as modern hard news stories often are now, but compare it to rambling, descriptive, narrative and POV pre-telegraph styles! The point about the seriousness of the wound is actually in the third par: "The wound is mortal", and repeated in the fourth: "The President ... is now dying." Remember this was written before Lincoln died, so his death was not a fact then, and the writer/editor may have been sensitive about alarming people unnecessarily. Also the (current) sentence in the article immediately following the example story comments on improvements that could be made. -- Bricaniwi (talk) 01:05, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I was struck by the same thing reading this.  Also note that the why is never mentioned at all - indeed, there is no mention of "sic semper tyrannis" or whateverinhell Booth shouted (and the reporters ought to have heard some story).  Maybe it's too obvious, or maybe the 7th W there is "whiteout", not sure which. Wnt (talk) 18:15, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Suitability of the Lincoln story as an example

message: This claim is particularly dubious, as what we today call simply the "telegraph" was originally termed the electric telegraph.  Semaphore-based telegraphs were in use earlier, starting with the late 1700s.  Fell Gleaming(talk) 10:35, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Invention of the Telegraph

message: As a rare books librarian, I know this image pre-dates its use by the news media by centuries.  In that light, it would seem appropriate to "make room" in the article for its use in colophons - and was only later adapted for news media. The way the article appears now (4 Sept. 2015), it reads as if the design is totally and nearly exclusively part of the news media which it isn't. - kosboot (talk) 16:28, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: When you say "this image" do you mean specifically the upside-down pyramid as a pictoral design and metaphor, or just the idea of organizing information this way? If it's the former, could you point to a source that could be cited in this article? - DavidWBrooks (talk) 00:29, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Much older than you think