The Inverted Pyramid and The Evolution of Newswriting :: essays papers

The Inverted Pyramid and The Evolution of NewswritingNewswriting, as it exists today, began with the adoption of the telegraph, which nearly coincided with the start of the American Civil War. The necessity of getting at story through before the telegraphs occasional malfunction forced a radical change in the style of writing used in reporting. Before the telegraph, often of writing news was just that writing. News was reported much like books were written. The reporter would set the scene with a detailed account of the setting or the mood and tell the tale just like some(prenominal) other narrative that one might read simply for pleasure. Since the telegraph made it possible for news to be printed the day after it happened it was immediately pick out as the preferred method of getting news to the newsroom. Occasionally, however, the telegraph line would go down. Often this happened during a transmission, and the remainder of the message could not be displace until the li ne was repaired. Since a detailed description of the setting and the mood are useless without the actual piece of news, the system of writing, now known as the change pyramid, in which the most important items are written first in a concise manner, was born. The inverted pyramid system, born of necessity, was absorbed into newswriting over the proceeding century, and exists today as the standard style for reporting news.At the beginning of the civil war, the protracted narrative style still predominated the newswriting of the period. For the most part, stories were verbose or so to the point of obsequy and read more like an intellectual discourse on the topic, rather than a report of news. In a story on the nominal head page of the Times of April 11, 1861, the reporter, who is begins his story, Every good citizen must rejoice that the new administration manifests a disposition to guard more faithfully its State secrets than did its predecessors. The promulgation of the purp oses of the Government while those are not yet entirely formed, or when disclosure would tend to defeat or embarrass them, is quite as unaccented as it is undignified. But this reticence may be carried to far, and lead to more mischief than it is designed to prevent. It is important to note that these lines come not from an editorial, but from a story on the front page of the paper and that this is not a follow up to a news story about the administrations decision to be more careful with its secrets.