Unbundling the news article

This week, I spoke to Semafor CEO Justin Smith ahead of the launch of the global news organization. The launch has been long in the making, and it will invariably have its critics, but I appreciate the ambition of taking such a big swing, not to mention how different it is to launch a media brand now vs a decade ago. Check out the interview on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Please send me feedback at bmorrissey@gmail.com.

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Unbundling the news article

The building block of journalism is the inverted pyramid news article. This is the first thing you learn as a reporter. You put the important information up top in the first sentence or two (the lede), followed by the all-important paragraph or two that sums up the main points of the article (the nut graf), followed by the context and further information. The best news articles give the reader 80% of what they need even if they only get through the first few paragraphs.

This approach was born of technological constraints of a bygone era.