Looking beyond the inverted pyramid

Are news reports always meant to look like this? 

Do you love reading the newspaper this way?

More importantly, have you ever even thought that you deserve to read news stories written in various ways?

So when was the last time you read something really gripping or engaging in a newspaper in Assam?

Something or someone you connected with or felt strongly about? I am not talking about a report on price hike of petrol or the cabinet reshuffle. Yes, both those reports can arouse different emotions in you but I am talking about something more intimate here. Stories, not mere reports which go beyond your immediate and direct concern but engage you and move you.  

What is the inverted pyramid structure?

Simply put, this is a news writing format where the most important facts of a report are written in the beginning. 

I was, till a couple of days ago, under the impression that the inverted pyramid was a product of the civil war of America (1861-1865) when editors were increasingly getting frustrated with the unreliable but expensive means of telegraph used by reporters to  transmit stories from the field. Make no mistake, back in the day, the telegraph was as revolutionary as the internet is today, but those were the early years and more often than not stories would get cut off mid-sentence due to failure of transmission. So as a solution, frustrated editors urged writers to fill in the most important facts first, followed by the lengthier details. Soon reporters developed a formula for compressing stories and summarizing the most important facts first. Over time this took a more refined shape with the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How being included in the summary and the formula came to be known as the Inverted pyramid. Thus, goes the story.

However, it seems this is no more than folklore.

Journalism historian David T.Z. Mindich, argued that the inverted pyramid was born at the time of Abraham Lincoln’s death but even this has been negated in findings by Marcus Errico.

Taking a look at Errico’s study here compels us to come to the conclusion that the ‘inverted pyramid structure’ or the ‘summary news lead’ did not become a norm till the first decade of the 20^th century although we cannot say that it was never used before that.

Today this is a formula religiously followed across the world although other formulas like The Martini lead and the Wall street journal lead are also used in the U.S. to structure the story. In India and here in Assam we rarely look beyond the inverted pyramid style. Assamese newspapers follow something of their own which can be at best described as similar to early 19^th century style of writing where the reporter starts a story by providing his own comments along with a flurry of adjectives to describe the story and ends with an opinion. The idea that a news report can also be explored in more detail in follow up stories, or it can be presented more engagingly in a different structure doesn’t seem to exist.

The Good

So why is it that the inverted pyramid lead is so widely accepted across the world? Well, for starters it lets us organize information effectively and quickly and is ideal for readers who want to get to the facts straight.  For reporters, it is an efficient way to understand breaking news or to write quick, short reports in case of breaking news. Further, it is also helpful from the perspective of the desk people because when it comes to quick editing the news reports can be easily trimmed from bottom up, the least important details are at the bottom in the inverted pyramid structure.

 

But is this the best or only way of structuring a story? Should it be always used?

Depending on the nature of the story or the news report the answer could be both yes and no.  However, what is definitely ‘yes’ is that there are more ways than one to write the newspaper story. 

Leads like the narrative lead, the anecdotal lead and the scene setter leads are just some of the few leads that can be used to break the monotony of the inverted pyramid.

The Bad

Former journalist Bruce DaSilva, once famously said. “The inverted pyramid remains the Dracula of journalism. It keeps rising from its coffin and sneaking into paper.”

Senior journalists here may and will argue that the job of the newspaper is to inform, it is not to connect on an emotional level but that is no reason for not looking beyond the inverted pyramid lead.

I believe that due to lack of reading good journalistic work, the stories come off as mere repetitions or shadows of one another, one more dull than the next bereft of any voice and as appealing as the electronic voice of a railway passenger enquiry system. 

  In an age of digital onslaught, when 24x7 news channels rule the roost (7 channels in Guwahati and counting) how can the print media do more ? Certainly not by giving dry, drab press releases of information. 

Looking beyond

Formulas are good but not at the expense of the heart of a story and the people it is written for. Generations of readers here have been accustomed to the substandard and the petty with little in terms of choice being offered to them. “We know best. This is what works and what you should read” seems to be an arrogant surmise. Thus, news stories are not something to be savoured and relished but something to be shoved down your throat like a pill that’s bitter but necessary.  With little attention being paid to the crafting of the story, the focus is more on cramming in more and more ‘facts’.  This creates a barrier of aloofness between the   story and the reader. Why should I care if there is a riot or 200 people died in a storm? It's just another bit of information for me on the paper. To connect with readers, I believe we need more than the inverted pyramid.  The readers here are perhaps content too because when you are a frog in the well you think the well is the world.

The offshoot of this is seen in the culture of apathy towards learning or writing good English. As long as you can write in the order of

         The most important facts first

             Lesser important fact

                  One more

                  One more

                    Zzzz…

barely managing to write grammatically correct English is considered good enough. The people on the desk will take care of the rest.

While most journalists here (including the new ones) would consider this sacrilege, they would be well informed to take note of stories being written across the globe.  So, while there is no doubting the utility and the worthiness of the inverted pyramid, it is time we pushed ourselves out of a mental rut and started thinking of journalistic writing as more than a mere collections of facts wrapped together by a blanket of 'objectivity'.  

So you want to be a journalist?

Journalism

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Wanted: A humane reporter

It’s been barely three weeks since a boat capsized in Dhubri district on the Brahmaputra River taking more than 100 people with it to a watery grave.

What did we get in terms of stories?

Day 1 - a lead report

Day 4 – a page 4 report on lapses / steps of district administration and that was it. A week later it had become one more incident to be stowed away in a newsroom morgue.  So long …see you…until the next boat sinks.

I believe, perhaps in my misguided idealistic way, that there is a reason why even newspaper reports are called ‘stories’. Stories are necessary for every human being. They move us, make us ponder and keep us alive.

Identifying the ‘story’ behind the ‘report’

I read a report about what could be a wonderful story about a football coach training a group of village girls with bare minimum facilities and trying to build a professional football team but I got nothing beyond clichéd parallels to a Bollywood movie. Where is the story in that?

Last year, at the peak of Garo- Rabha conflicts, I looked desperately and hoped someone would perhaps do some story on the people who had been affected but the dead and the injured were reduced to mere statistics in a refugee camp on a piece of paper and today very few would remember the incident until the next ethnic clash breaks out.

These are just a few examples. Researched and detailed human interest stories could have been attempted on various topics over the last one year like man-elephant conflict, the issue of satras losing land to illegal immigrants, the security for elderly persons in the city or the Garo –Rabha conflicts. However newspaper houses do not seem to have the time, inclination or resources to invest in such an exercise but happily invest in run-of-the-mill sensationalist tripe.

The inhuman human interest

For all the criticism of the US media, they have not forgotten or given up on one thing completely – human interest stories or follow up stories.

All this leads me to make a rather sweeping statement that some of the most ‘inhuman’ form of reporting is done here. To be fair, to the journalists here, they have been brought up on the strict diet of ‘stick to the facts’ and ‘the inverted pyramid’. Secondly, many of these stories require lot of planning and endless hours of observation, something which can’t be done in the span of a day. But yet, these factors can be no excuse for churning out ‘fill in the pages’ kind of stories.

I struggle to find a distinct voice in any newspaper – a voice that  tells us a story, calls out to us, soothes us, reminds us to have faith in ourselves  and confronts us with the humane human inside us.

Are we really concerned as human beings? Are we are going to  go beyond our token 350 word report on the incident that calls for implementation of monitoring and safety measures every time a boat sinks only to forget it two weeks later? Can we raise the same points while portraying the story of the people and not by merely giving a collection of quotes?

Facts can be adhered to without letting go of the human element in the story and reporters can be objective too.   

‘Human interest’ in the Assamese dailies here is essentially reports oozing with melodrama and in English newspapers it is something too ‘soft’ and definitely not a way to do ‘serious’ reporting.   TV journalists seem to nurture the belief that showing images of a howling, grief stricken mother lamenting her young son’s death qualifies as ‘human interest’. Zooming in and zooming out on the face of the lady continuously is supposed to make me sentimental, I guess.

Sticking to cold hard facts is good but sometimes you need to go beyond that and bring alive the scenarios around you so that your readers can actually see and feel something in the words and it doesn’t become just another lump of black on a white background.

We claim that we are human beings, it’s time we became humane.