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But recently, several writers have argued that this model is outdated and needs to give way to a new system where context is king, Jason Fry argues that this "upside-down storytelling" is broken and while his piece primarily deals with sports reporting, his arguments equally apply to other areas.
