News and its communicative quality: the inverted pyramid—when and why did it appear?

Abstract

There is a general assumption that the inverted pyramid (lead-and-body principle, answers to four or five w-questions at the beginning of the article) became a professional standard during the American Civil War (1861–65), either because of the unreliability of the new telegraph technology (technological explanation); or because of the information policy of the Union (political explanation); or because of the increasing commercial interests of publishers and competition between them (economical explanation). But a content analysis of the New York Herald and the New York Times shows that the inverted pyramid became commonplace only two decades later. Between 1880 and 1890, moreover, publishers and editors attempted systematically to enhance the comprehensibility of their products by using, for example, headlines and illustrations. The author therefore favours the thesis that the journalistic routine and genre of the inverted pyramid resulted from the professional effort to strengthen the communicative quality of news.