News format: all hail the inverted pyramid

News stories traditionally begin with the most important details, tapering to less critical ones towards the end. This inverted pyramid format “organizes stories not around ideas or chronologies but around facts,” explained New York University Journalism Professor Mitchell Stephens in A History of News. “It weighs and shuffles the various pieces of information, focusing with remarkable single-mindedness on their relative news value.”

Some historians link the style's birth to the expense of the telegraph. Flowery nineteenth-century language fell by the wayside, as Civil War stories clicked across the country at a penny a character. Wire services inspired brisk impartial news, bulletins useful to all papers, regardless of their political persuasion. As Columbia University's Professor James Carey observed: “It eliminated the letter-writing correspondent, who announced an event and described it in rich detail as well as analyzing its substance, and replaced him with a stringer who supplied the bare facts.”

The inverted pyramid was crucial in the days before digital design. Typesetters laid down columns of text. When the space ran out, the article ended with a decisive swipe of the exacto knife. Yet newspapers still employ the technique, especially for hard news. It survives for good reason, according to Christopher 'Chip' Scanlan, director of the National Writers Workshops. “Many readers are impatient and want stories to get to the point immediately. In fast-breaking news situations … the pyramid allows the news writer to rewrite the top of the story continually, keeping it up-to-date,” he observed on the Poynter Institute's website, where the senior faculty member is a columnist. “It's also an extremely useful tool for thinking and organizing because it forces the reporter to sum up the point of the story in a single paragraph.”

That chunk of text is traditionally called a “nut graf”: this passage showcases an article's essence and traditionally follows the lede, the introductory hook. Ken Wells, a writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal, described it as “a paragraph that says what this whole story is about and why you should read it. It's a flag to the reader, high up in the story: You can decide to proceed or not, but if you read no farther, you know what that story's about.”

To encourage traffic from search engines, try to place key nut graf details in the first 25 words, displayed when people search on a topic. The more stylish and information-dense you make that introduction, the more audience you're likely to attract.