The inverted pyramid might still have a place in journalism, but it doesn’t make sense as the dominant writing style on the Web.
In fact, the beauty of the Web is that each story can have a different writing style. And story lengths are no longer dictated by arbitrary space constraints in print publications. The Web has liberated journalism writing.
Blogs have flourished because they don’t have any legacy writing ideals to uphold. Bloggers just write, and they write in the formats that make sense for each individual post. Bloggers also aren’t afraid to make short posts every time new information comes in — instead of collecting all the information for one long, inverted pyramid story.
It’s time for publications that haven’t started rethinking written content on the Web to do so. There are some mainstream journalists already mixing things up, and a great place to look for inspiration is the world of sports journalism.
Most sports journalists become journalists because they love and want to cover sports. Many news and features reporters become reporters because they love to write. That’s a large disconnect that explains why most of the more innovative written content on the Web comes from sports journalists.
That’s why places like ESPN.com don’t have problems breaking standard journalism conventions. The people who work for ESPN.com love sports. And while many of them might love writing, sports is their real passion.
Ultimately, we are in the reporting business. Our job is to report in the most concise and appropriate form possible. Even now that we have a myriad of tools like video, audio, multimedia, databases, etc to work with, written content still makes the sense for the majority of stories (I often won’t click on stories at CNN.com that don’t have a written version. Sometimes I just don’t want to watch a 3-5 minute video report.).
When we talk about writing on the Web, however, we shouldn’t look to print as an inspiration. Writing for print, especially newspapers, has several limitations. Space being a major one.
Many reporters are told they need to write a 15-inch story, for example. Not because the story should be 15 inches, but because that much space must be filled in the newspaper. So, the story might be stretched a bit, or simply cut short, often leaving out important details.
Thats the kind of pitfall we can avoid on the Web. Sometimes a story only needs a few paragraphs, other times it needs more. That’s a fact that bloggers have been exploiting for years.
The inverted pyramid makes sense for publications that have to worry about space. When someone writes a story in that format (most important information first, least important last), it makes cutting words, sentences and paragraphs for space really easy. But space (in that sense) is not a consideration.
But that’s just the tip of how we can rewrite and rethink written content on the Web. One of the most useful ways to write on the Web is completely unlike the inverted pyramid or the standard five-paragraph essay we wrote in school — writing with vignettes or bullet points.
ESPN.com is filled with a ton of written content. Much of, however, is not like standard journalism writing. Mel Kiper Jr., for instance, graded every NFL teams’ draft today, but he didn’t write it like a standard story. He broke it down in 32 individual vignettes that fit together into a total package. It allows users to easily find which teams they care about, while also not making this written piece seem as long as it is (it’s about 4,500 words, but it feels like a breeze).
ESPN.com also had a fantastic draft blog by Pat Yasinskas. Some posts are more than 600 words, while others are two sentences. Other posts are mostly bullet points.
One things you’ll surely notice is how each post is clear, concise and to the point. The posts are not written in the standard inverted pyramid style. They are just written in a logical way that makes sense.
In our Army/Navy special feature from last fall, I compiled some key statistics about the game. I could have written it like a standard story with complete sentences and paragraphs, but it made much more sense to break it down with bullet points. I wrote another piece for that feature where I created four vignettes of key players.
CNN.com instituted a great feature last year where they put bullet points at the top of each of their written stories that give people the major points of the story. Some journalists would probably hate to see their hard work distilled down to four bullet points, but it’s an incredible feature for users. A person can now read the headline, the lede (I hate this archaic term) and the bullet points and get the general gist of the story in about 30 seconds.
CNN.com’s way of handling written content makes sense in a world where people read stories in RSS readers, on the go and in general consume a lot of content very quickly. When journalists don’t concern themselves with trying to collect clips or win awards, they can begin to create written content that really works for users in the 21st century.
Ultimately, journalists need to understand how users use news on the Web. It’s vastly different than how people use dead tree publications. This means a lot less feature ledes (I often will close out of stories I find on the Web that have feature ledes when it’s a hard news story), getting away from the inverted pyramid and embracing more immediate and less encumbered forms of writing.
This is my April post for the Carnival of Journalism. It is currently hosted by Yoni Greenbaum over at Editor on the Verge.
