The model of unfinished news


News Diamond

Paul Bradshaw adds the “news diamond” to the inverted pyramid. Or rather, he says, the news diamond is the new inverted pyramid.

For us in the U.S. (and Japan and several Latin American countries), this has lots of baseball analogy possibilities: “That story was a walk-off grand slam.”

Attempts at humor aside, it’s a pretty good model of how online news ought to flow.

Bradshaw says:

Just as the inverted pyramid was partly a result of the increasing role of the
telegraph in the news industry, and dominant cultural ideas of empiricism and
science, this news diamond attempts to illustrate the change from a 19th century
product (the article) to a 21st century process: the
iterative journalism of new media; the story that is forever
‘unfinished’. More than anything, it’s designed to challenge the dominance of
the inverted pyramid, to illustrate its origins in the industrial era, and its
shortcomings.

Here’s what his diamond looks like:

Paul Bradshaw's News Diamond