Week 3: Assignment and Student Response

WednesdayApr 11 at 4:22pm

Manage Discussion Entry

The inverted pyramid, when used in journalistic writing, places the summary of a story and the most important facts at the very beginning. The information that follows is presented in order of relevance rather than in typical chronological fashion, with the least important facts--though they are still relevant to the story--presented at the end.

Most breaking news or hard news stories are written with the inverted pyramid structure. This structure allows the reader to get a complete summary of the facts right off the bat. For readers, like myself, who may get bored half-way through a story or don't have time to read further, I can still tell someone else 'what the story was about' because I was provided with all of the important information at the beginning. Furthermore, the average reader doesn't want to have to search for the facts of a story; thus, presenting those facts at the beginning and in subsequent relevant order makes it easier for the reader.

According to the course text, The Elements of News Writing, feature stories are more likely to use story structures outside of the inverted pyramid because a feature story "must have something to grab and hold the reader's interest other than the newsworthiness associated with hard news stories" (Kershner, 2009). In other words, the purpose of a feature story is to take the information provided in a hard news story to the next level, giving the reader more in-depth information than a hard news story allows. For example, when the Harvey Weinstein story broke there was initial breaking news coverage. Every story that followed that discussed an individual affected by his horrid behavior was a feature story highlighting select details, and expounding upon detail, in the original story.