One of the first things journalism students learn about news writing is the inverted pyramid: putting the most important facts first.
There’s something of a science when it comes to writing a news story. Journalists must organize facts in a way designed to make the story easy to understand and follow. One of the tools they rely on is what we call the inverted pyramid.
Imagine an upside-down pyramid. The widest part (on top) is the most important and newest facts. The further down you go, the details become less critical to the story. That means they’re mostly background information that might enhance your understanding. But those facts, theoretically, could be dropped from the story without the story being hard to follow.
I’ll give you an example: Let’s say there’s a story about a prison inmate filing an appeal for a new trial. The new part of the story is the appeal itself. Critical, most important details involve the basic who, what, when, where, why and how answers. Who filed the appeal? When was it filed? Why was it filed? When will a judge decide if the appeal will even be considered?
But the further down the story you go, the facts should become less important to the new part of the story. That background information might be details from the initial trial that landed the inmate behind bars in the first place.
It’s a rough example, but you get the idea.
The story of the inverted pyramid seems perfectly believable
When you hear the backstory behind that inverted pyramid, you’d probably believe it. It sounds perfectly plausible.
The pyramid’s origin, as the story goes, is the Civil War. War correspondents had to rely on telegraph lines to transmit their stories from the battleground to their papers wherever they were. But it was a war, after all. And in war, damage occurs. Telegraph lines weren’t immune to explosions.
The philosophy was that by loading the newest, most important information at the top, the reporter had a better chance of getting the meat of the story across should ordnance wipe out a telegraph line in the middle of sending the story.
When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. I don’t know how many transmissions of news stories were interrupted during the Civil War. But I would call it a plausible story.
That’s the story I heard for years.
But it might not be accurate after all
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida. It suggests the inverted pyramid didn’t originate quite that way.
Poynter says at a cost of a penny per word, newspapers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to report the war. It was the economic pressure more than the threat of downed telegraph lines that began the journey to brevity. The telegraph bill more than the threat of an outage drove the evolution of news writing.
But as for the pyramid itself, researchers who studied leading American papers from the Civil War “find numerous examples of stories written in the chronological style of the day rather than the ‘first news first’ style of the inverted pyramid,” Poynter says.
It suggests the real start of the pyramid style might not have started with a journalist. Instead, the American Secretary of War might be responsible.
It was on the morning of April 15, 1865. The night before, John Wilkes Booth fired a shot at Ford’s Theater, mortally wounding President Abraham Lincoln. That morning, Lincoln lay dying.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote a telegram that newspapers received. Editors decided to run Stanton’s account on the front page. Poynter shows how that telegram read at its website here. But I’ll quote its first line:
This evening at about 9:30 p.m. at Ford’s Theatre, the President, while sitting in his private box with Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Harris and Major Rathburn, was shot by an assassin, who suddenly entered the box and approached behind the President.
By today’s standards, as Poynter points out, it may seem “pretty old-fashioned.”
“But in 1865 it represented a revolutionary departure from the way news was normally presented,” Poynter says.
So it might not have been the Civil War itself, but rather a story about its last casualty, that created the inverted pyramid.
