4.3: Inverted pyramid story structure
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Straight news stories that start with strong summary leads are well on their way to being done, but many beginning newswriters may not know where to go next. The model of the inverted pyramid gives us a complete picture of how to tell the rest of the story.
Inverted pyramid
The vast majority of straight news stories are organized using the inverted pyramid structure. It allows readers to grasp the most crucial details quickly and then continues adding information in descending order of importance. This serves two purposes. It is convenient for readers, and using the inverted pyramid format makes it easier for editors to cut a story from the bottom, if necessary.
Invented more than a century ago, the inverted pyramid remains the basic formula for writing straight news stories.
Once you’ve written the lead, give the reader more information in the body of the article. This is your opportunity to elaborate by including facts in descending order of importance.
Use short, simple sentences written in the active voice where possible. Organize them into paragraphs of no more than two to three sentences. This goes for straight news and most feature news stories. Use direct, partial and indirect quotes properly formatted with attribution to provide readers with emotional, personalized perspectives. The least important details should appear at the end of the article, where they may be cut by an editor to save space or to save readers time.
Almost all hard news is written in the third person. This means writers should avoid pronouns such as “I,” “me,” “we,” and “us,” which are first-person pronouns that, if they are ever used, might be more suited to opinion pieces. The second person, or use of “you” as a pronoun of direct address, is usually avoided in news writing.
About objectivity
While traditionally most newswriters and editors strive to present news from an objective point of view in terms of word choice and tone, absolute, scientific objectivity is not possible to achieve when writing about human events and issues.
Newswriters should strive to include and to accurately represent all of the key stakeholders involved in a story and their points of view. Additionally, they should not show favoritism or bias in what they include in news stories, what they leave out or how they present information, but they should also be transparent about the values, ethical priorities and ingrained biases they bring with them to their writing.
Being objective does not mean repeating lies or publishing information from sources without thinking critically and verifying information before publishing it. Nor does it mean pitting two extreme stakeholder representatives in opposition to one another as a means of providing readers with a false sense of balance.
Bothsidesism is the belief that journalists should strive to always provide equal coverage to all sides of an issue, to paraphrase from a research article by Forman-Katz and Jurkowitz. The problem with covering both sides of every issue equally is twofold. Sometimes the stakeholders interested in an issue do not neatly align themselves into two "sides." Also, there are many instances where those on one side of an issue present mostly verifiable facts while those on the other side of the issue present misinformation or unverifiable information, such as conspiracy theories. Lies do not warrant equal weight in news stories just because they are repeated often enough that large groups of people believe them.
All news should be based on facts. Straight news stories in particular should stick to the facts, even when groups have a vested interest in obscuring or clouding facts with their opinions or fabricated information.
Other story types based on the inverted pyramid
Some straight news stories build on the inverted pyramid story structure in creative ways without treading into feature news territory.
One model goes by different names but involves starting a straight news story by focusing on an individual and their circumstances before broadening out to what would otherwise be a summary lead. From that point, the rest of the story is structured like the inverted pyramid before returning to the main character. Essentially, the writer is adding the central character's POV as a frame wrapped around an inverted pyramid story. Stories told using this structure can cover a topic affecting millions of people in a relatable way.
Another hard news story structure that builds on the inverted pyramid starts with a summary lead, includes a relatively short but complete inverted pyramid story before concluding with a chronology of events.
This form of story is useful for attempting to make sense of a chaotic event where many things happened at once. The reader can still be hooked and informed with the traditional summary lead and inverted pyramid story, while the writer can also include important information in an orderly fashion.
Chronological storytelling works in these cases because the event is so great in terms of its impact that readers will be interested in knowing how things unfolded to the best of the writer's knowledge at the time.