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Comment by lozenge | Hacker News Reader

There used to be a style for journalism called reverse pyramid. The most important part is at the start and then details get filled in. Online video has turned this on its head.

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That was as much a product of market circumstance as the current click-bait: Due to space constraints and the possibility of breaking news, editors would regularly cut articles from the bottom up to save space. Reporters could not know whether their story would be cut or by how much. So as a practical matter they had to front-load the most important parts.

So it isn't today, plenty of space, but space alone doesn't scale cash.

I’m sure that was part of the motivation, but it was taught to me as “readers often stop reading after one or two grafs, so put the most important information up front.”

It ends up working so that both pressures apply the same way: reverse pyramid organizes information so busy/distracted readers should get the most salient bits, and also lets editors cut the less important details for space. Whether this worked out, I think, was pretty dependent on the journalist and publication, but “most important” is usually a bit subjective so that’s to be expected.

Almost everyone who reads your stuff online is busy/distracted, because they're online. They may have 40 tabs open. You have to give them a reason to be interested in your tab, fast. If you don't give it to them in... 7 seconds? 5? 3? Then they're gone. They close your tab and move on to the next one.

They're probably not even reading your first paragraph. They're skimming it. They might skim the second. You want them to actually read your article? Give them a reason in that first paragraph. Give them more reason in the second. Keep giving it to them, paragraph by paragraph. If you don't, they're gone.

This style of journalism predated “online” by decades or longer.

Even then people skimmed print newspapers. It’s why they were in columns and grafs were short (often one sentence). All of that was designed to make articles easy to skim.

And yes, distraction/boredom was part of it but so was a lack of time for most readers. A lot of news was read over a short breakfast before going to work. A lot of conventions were designed to make it easy to get a quick and broad overview of what the editor thought was important: pyramid style, short blips before “continued on page 11”, putting important things above the fold, etc.

It’s interesting which of those aspects translate well to online journalism and which don’t.

Especially wire service copy. It let editors cut articles at a more or less arbitrary point to fill the available space. Magazine articles by contrast weren't necessarily structured the same way.

A lot of people like to worship inverted pyramid as some Platonic ideal, but it was certainly not universally used outside of situations where there were some specific constraints.

I sorely miss that kind of quality journalism. The Wall Street Journal still practices it (mostly). Everywhere else is, as you say, turned on its head by starting with click bait questions that only get answered at the end of the article, if at all.

Obligatory get off my lawn and shakes fist at cloud.

Sadly, due to being on the first floor* I don't have a lawn.

I do keep considering balcony mounts for what would've been the lawn defence cannon though.

* en_UK first floor, mind, I know en_US insists on 1-based indexing rather than 0-based for floors but I don't particularly like writing FORTRAN either.

In the US floor numbering is ordinal, 1st, 2nd, etc. In the UK it seems like they are cardinal or nominal.

Do you have a zeroth floor?

Yes, and negative numbers as well.

https://i.redd.it/8vuvnovra9b31.jpg

I believe they call the zeroth floor the "ground floor".

Yep, Ground, 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.

Which I would argue is close enough for me to consider it zero-based.

Elevators in the UK mostly have G rather than 0 on the buttons so far as I can remember though; I've completely forgotten what mainland Europe does.

Burying the lede? Interestingly I searched for the phrase and the second hit was someone describing why they were leaving NYT.

This is called the inverted pyramid and should be referred to in the present tense. It is still taught and it is still used.

https://journalism.uoregon.edu/tough-decisions-inverted-pyra...

Much of what is on the web posing as "news" is not journalism, IMO. It's garbage.

Say thank you to the advertising industry ("is this video long enough so we can slap a midroll ad in it?")

Long-form journalism did too, where I have to wade through long physical descriptions of all the relevant parties before I begin to get inklings of what actually happened that's supposed to be so interesting.

Long-form journalism is for those who want to read, not who want to get information. And that's fine. "For those who like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like." The problem comes when long-form journalism and "news" are put in the same "list of things you might be interested in reading".

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