• Margaret Simons

23 April 2008
The internet is creating a more dynamic and interactive understanding of what disinterested reporting can mean, writes MARGARET SIMONS

PLENTY is being said these days about the potential for internet based publications to become a ?fifth estate? commenting on and watching the mainstream media. Recently Jason Wilson coined the term ?gatewatchers? for what bloggers and publications such as Crikey can do. They keep the gatekeepers accountable.

All this is very good and true, but much less has been said about the impact of technology on the way in which stories are actually written ? not so much the subject matter, but the writing technique and style.

Two years ago I signed a retainer agreement with the email and internet based news service Crikey. This month therefore marks the second anniversary of my transition from a traditional print media journalist to one whose primary outlet is email and the internet. It seems to be a fitting time for some reflections on how the experience has changed my journalism.

In universities and newsrooms around Australia, junior journalists are taught to write news stories according to an ?inverted pyramid? model. The metaphor of the inverted pyramid catches the idea that the most important part of the story ? the most surprising or substantial fact ? should come first. In news stories there should be no throat clearing or preliminaries, students are told. No ?dear reader? or setting of the scene. Get straight to the point.

Readers should be able to stop reading at any point and understand the basics of the news, even if they don?t have all the details. The inverted pyramid also allows the sub-editors to cut a story to fit a newspaper layout simply by lopping paragraphs off the bottom. A good reporter will write each paragraph so it can stand alone, without referring to other paragraphs.

The idea of the inverted pyramid is so imbedded in the way most journalists write that it seems to be the natural order. One of the nastier things you can say to a journalist is to accuse them of burying the lead, which means failing to put the news in the first paragraph. To accuse them of this is to attack their professional competence. Yet the inverted pyramid is a relatively recent invention, and the consequence of technology. So too is the neutral, impartial (or apparently impartial) language of modern news reporting.

Early newspapers took their form from correspondence ? and indeed were largely reliant on the mail to bring them news. As a result newspaper stories were long, leisurely, had a beginning, middle and an end and were often opinionated. The notion of objectivity in news and the inverted pyramid both emerged at about the same time, and were at least in part the product of the invention of the telegraph, which required that news be transmitted as quickly and using as few characters as possible. The technology imposed a hierarchy of importance that persists to this day.

So will technology once again change the form of news reporting? Two years of writing for Crikey has convinced me that it will.

For my first few months of writing for Crikey, I stuck to more or less traditional print forms. Quite quickly, reader feedback told me that I wasn?t hitting the mark. For a start, I was too sober. Readers of Crikey wanted to know not only the facts, but also have an idea of the ?take.? They didn?t want objectivity if that meant the copy was written as though by a robot. They wanted what a fiction writer might call narrative voice. The internet demands personality.

In this way it seemed to me that the internet was harking back to the letter writing forms of old. I was once again a ?correspondent? in the true meaning of that term, with the difference being that the replies came back very quickly indeed, and were usually embarrassingly public. Readers were very free with disagreement and discussion ? not only on the Crikey website (which has only recently allowed for this) but on the many blog sites that kept a close eye on what Crikey is doing.

What about the facts? My impression is that even though readers of Crikey want personality with their news, they also want to know that the author has got the facts right. This, I think, challenges journalists to develop an idea of what objectivity means over and above sober-sides language and scrupulous ?balance?.

It should be said that the journalism profession is in many ways pre-modern. While academics might find it laughable, within newsrooms the idea that it is both possible and essential to be objective is proclaimed with little reflection or examination. During my own training at the Age newspaper in the early 1980s ? a time when most cadets were still recruited straight from school and graduates, let alone graduates from journalism courses, were a rarity ? there was controversy on the sub-editors? table about whether we should even refer to ourselves as ?journalists.? The term was thought to be unbearably pretentious. Most of the traditionalists preferred the term ?reporter.? We were told that our job was simply to report objectively verifiable facts ? to be like a camera taking a picture. This was seen as an uncomplicated thing to do.

Journalism is a remorselessly practical profession. In its daily routine it is completely out of touch with post-modern arguments about facts and objective truth. Such debates bear about the same relation to daily journalism practice as does quantum physics to bridge building. In its faith in objective fact, the culture of journalism is old fashioned in the same way that the law is old fashioned.

In their eminently practical book on journalistic ethics, the journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have proposed a more robust definition of ?journalistic truth.? They say it is more than mere accuracy, and has little to do with notions of balance or lack of bias.

?It is a sorting out process that develops between the initial story and the interaction of the public, newsmakers and journalists over time,? they write. ?This first principle of journalism ? its disinterested pursuit of truth ? is ultimately what sets it apart from all other forms of communications.?

Two years of Crikey have convinced me that this is not only correct, but is also an understanding suited to the internet age, in which interactivity and the art of conversation, have for the first time become an essential part of the journalistic method. It is no accident, I think, that one of the best read sections of Crikey is the ?Comments Corrections and Cockups? section at the bottom, where readers tell us in very direct terms where we got it wrong, what they think of it and where we should shove it.

After two years, I find that I write much more irreverently than I ever did for broadsheet newspapers. Partly this is a matter of colloquial language. I might describe the government as having ?stuffed up? a process ? words I would never use in a broadsheet, where I would be more likely to employ some distancing terms such as ?questions are being asked about? or ?doubts are being expressed.? I quite often start a story with a quote, then proceed to provide the context. This is anathema to the inverted pyramid style. Wherever possible I include a joke.

Within all this, I still do my best to get the facts straight, not least because if I make a blooper I hear about it within minutes of publication, instead of waiting a day or more for the outraged letters to the editor to arrive.

The other big alteration to the way I write is the ability to use hotlinks. Earlier this week, for example, I filed this story about the impact on community broadcasting organizations of the transition to digital radio. It is a complicated yarn, with a lot of technical and legal detail ?below the waterline? of the text. Getting my head around the background took me most of a day. I had to learn what a digital multiplex was, and sort through a host of acronyms. Yet the challenge was to get all this across in an accessible and readable fashion.

I spent a fair bit of the morning trying to think of the lead. Could I say that the government was threatening the future of community radio? Not really, or not so simply. It isn?t yet clear that the future is digital.

Could I say that there would be a protest, a groundswell, action of any kind? Not really. The story was one of great burdens and slow process.

The result was that I started the article with a question. No inverted pyramid story would start in this way, yet I think I was able to use the question to allude to a background and history of other challenges for community broadcasting, as well as signaling my own point of view.

If the rest of the story has a structure that can be summed up by metaphor, I would describe it as a plait with several strands. Certainly it is not an inverted pyramid. The inverted pyramid might be good for conveying simple information quickly, but it is hopeless for explanation and background ? which is what this story is mostly about.

Then there are the hotlinks. The use of hotlinks means I am able to write even short stories as layered exercises ? sometimes linking to my own past reportage, but also, as in this case, providing readers with both further information and effectively footnoting the text.

Linking can serve other purposes as well. I remember a year ago writing another critical piece about then shadow minister for communications, Stephen Conroy. I was criticising him for not having released a communications policy, despite many promises that he would do so. I suggested that he was ?busy with other things?, and hotlinked those words to an internal Labor Party blog that shellacked Conroy for playing nasty factional games. Hotlinking can be sly, and ironic. It introduces layers of meaning into the story.

We are of course too close to the invention of the internet to predict where it will lead us, but on the basis of two years experience I am prepared to make some tentative predictions to what it will do to journalistic forms.

First, the faux objective language of most news reportage is probably at an end ? but I think this will lead not to a lack of impartiality, but rather a more dynamic and interactive understanding of what disinterested reportage can mean.

Second, journalists will have to be good at conversation and explanation, and this will involve more footnoting ? telling the readers more about the process that resulted in the published story. This is partly because hotlinking makes footnoting possible, but it is also because in the online environment people want to interact with the story, and question it. Rosenstiel and Kovacs?s sorting out process takes off from the second of publication and proceeds at a fast and furious pace.

Lastly, the inverted pyramid remains a useful idea, but it will no longer be the dominant form of news reporting. Instead the structure of reportage in the future will be better conceived as a map or a web. You can look at just one point on the map, or you can click through it, discovering more and more of the surrounding landscape. ?

Margaret Simons?s latest book, The Content Makers: Understanding the Media in Australia, is published by Penguin.

Photo: Camilo Jimenez/iStockphoto.com