Is Digitization Turning the Inverted Pyramid Upside Down? A Longitudinal Analysis of a Hundred Years of News Storytelling

The inverted pyramid model for structuring news articles, according to which the most important facts are presented in the lead sentence, can be regarded as a cornerstone of journalism. In this longitudinal study, news articles from various German media were analyzed over a 100-year period. Automated content analysis was applied to a large corpus of German news articles published between 1924 and 2024 to detect whether the so-called 5W1H-questions were answered at the beginning of the news stories. We focused on the prominence of the concrete facts what, who, when, where, without coding for why and how. This was complemented by a qualitative analysis of semistructured interviews with journalists from three generations, to contextualize and interpret the longitudinal quantitative findings. According to the results, the news structure remained stable both in media practice and in journalists’ perceptions of how news should be structured throughout the twentieth century. However, in the digital era this news structure appears to be under pressure. The findings suggest that while the inverted pyramid model remained remarkably resilient across different political regimes of the twentieth century, its dominance has begun to fluctuate in the context of a shifting media ecosystem and probably new business models online.