Page 53 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

Welcome Back, Old Friend

and the grimy soot that permeates every inch of the rickety
remains. Give the readers a big sniff of the horrible stench
emanating from the structure. Allow your readers feel the
crunch of the burnt wood the firefighters walked over as they
fought the blaze. Report with all of your senses and you’ll help
your audience feel more deeply connected to the scene.

Welcome Back, Old Friend

For what seems like an interminable number of years, writers, edi-
tors, and educators have been sounding the death knell of the inverted
pyramid. It’s been called boring, among other things, and yet for some
reason, trend after trend in journalism has been unable to unseat it.
The immediacy-based approach to journalism that the Web requires
seems to have resuscitated the inverted pyramid.
The inverted pyramid is a simple form of writing that attempts to
address the legendary “five Ws and one H” of journalism. (For those of
you who don’t know or can’t recall, they are who, what, when, where,
why, and how.) It is used to pack the top of the story with as much 43
information as possible and tells the story, with the most important
paragraph at the top and the least important one at the bottom.
Notice that the last sentence says “least important,” not “unimpor-
tant.” Regardless of how much space in which you have to operate,
there should never be an unimportant paragraph. Each paragraph
should, in some way, add value to the story. In newspapers, space
is finite, with a limited number of inches available for all the stories
that need to go into the paper. On the Web, space is infinite, but
just because the space is available, it doesn’t mean you should use it.
An overly long story can be just as boring on a Web site as it is in a
newspaper or magazine. Furthermore, the medium itself screams for
immediacy.
In using the inverted pyramid, you learn how to prioritize informa-
tion and give the readers what they want to know most, first. People
who get their news from the Web are often racing through the Internet
and will need something truly great to stop them in their tracks. You
want to make sure that you’ve got the most interesting and important
information high enough that it does just that. No one is going to stop
for a story that starts off with “Smithville Zoo keepers reported Monday
an incident involving an animal.” However, this opening is likely to get
a second look: “The largest python in captivity disappeared from the