The inverted pyra­mid style of reportage is bro­ken, believes Jason Fry, and it is time to rein­vent con­text­less report­ing into a more reader-friendly style.

Fry points to an essen­tial Nie­man Reports essay that sug­gests how context-central report­ing could be the future of report­ing and a rea­son why Wikipedia is becom­ing the des­ti­na­tion of choice for those want­ing to be informed on cur­rent events.

Ed Yong pro­vides a good sum­mary, intro­duc­ing it with:

News jour­nal­ism relies on a tried-and-tested model of inverted sto­ry­telling. Con­trary to the introduction-middle-end style of writ­ing that per­vades school essays and sci­en­tific papers, most news sto­ries shove all the key facts into the first para­graphs, leav­ing the rest of the prose to present back­ground, details and other para­pher­na­lia in descend­ing order of impor­tance. The idea behind this inverted pyra­mid is that a story can be short­ened by what­ever degree with­out los­ing what are pre­sumed to be the key facts.

But recently, sev­eral writ­ers have argued that this model is out­dated and needs to give way to a new sys­tem where con­text is king.

via @siibo