1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Writing 115
This means getting to the main thrust of the story immediately.
Try to make the very first word a strong, specific one. Do not
drown your readers in a murky soup of councils, committees,
chairmen/women and departments. If these bodies have made a
significant decision (not always the case), tell the reader what it is
and what effect it will have on them. The fine detail of which body
made the decision can come after the first couple of paras.
Also, avoid starting an intro with direct quotes. People don’t
know who’s uttering them. Avoid introducing unidentified facts,
events or people at the very start of a story as it can confuse the
reader. Confusion rapidly leads to disinterest and then disengagement,
particularly in the scanning online environment.
The BBC is aware of this precarious grip on the attention of the
online reader and makes an interesting comparison with broadcasting:
‘On radio and TV, you sometimes have to lead listeners/
viewers gently into a story. On the Web, you need to get into the
story immediately’ (The Online Journalist, 2000).
This is why some other newspaper intro techniques are less
successful for online. The most well known is probably the
delayed drop. This is where the main thrust of the story, it’s raison
d’être so to speak, is not in the first paragraph. Instead it is placed
later in the story, the readers usually being gently led towards it
by a narrative style of writing.
As Sellers (1968) points out, even in newspapers the delayed
drop can pose problems:
This form of intro – the delayed drop, the slow burn – is the
most difficult one to practise. It assumes that the story is so
beautifully written, so compulsively readable, that the customer
will be swept along till he reaches a buried news point
12 paragraphs on.
But life is not like that. The average newspaper reader does
not approach his paper as he does a short story: it is quite
likely that he is reading it standing in a bus or in the four and
half minutes he is waiting for a train. The incidental facts are
probably not vivid enough to carry him through to a climax
. . . All this is not to say that delayed drop stories are out. But
99 times out of a hundred the news is the thing.