Newswriting, as it exists today, began with the adoption of the telegraph, which roughly coincided with the start of the American Civil War. The necessity of getting at story through before the telegraph’s occasional malfunction forced a radical change in the style of writing used in reporting. Before the telegraph, much of writing news was just that: writing. News was reported much like books were written. The reporter would set the scene with a detailed account of the setting or the mood and tell the tale just like any other narrative that one might read simply for pleasure. Since the telegraph made it possible for news to be printed the day after it happened; it was immediately adopted as the preferred method of getting news to the newsroom. Occasionally, however, the telegraph line would go down. Often this happened during a transmission, and the remainder of the message could not be sent until the line was repaired. Since a detailed description of the setting and the mood are useless without the actual piece of news, the system of writing, now known as the inverted pyramid, in which the most important items are written first in a concise manner, was born. The inverted pyramid system, born of necessity, was absorbed into newswriting over the proceeding century, and exists today as the standard style for reporting news.At the beginning of the civil war, the protracted narrative style still predominated the newswriting of the period. For the most part, stories were verbose almost to the point of obsequy and read more like an intellectual discourse on the topic, rather than a report of news. In a story on the front page of the Times of April 11, 1861, the reporter, who is begins his story, “Every good citizen must rejoice that the new administration manifests a disposition to guard more faithfully its State secrets than did its predecessors. The promulgation of the purposes of the Government while those are no...
