Clicks have killed the Inverted Pyramid

Writing students once learned that putting the most important information first in an article was the preferred, humane way of reporting on a situation. This allowed readers to quickly decide if a story interested them without having to read further. My second college degree is in Radio and Television Broadcasting. As part of the curriculum, I had classes in print journalism, which taught me that good news stories begin with an "inverted pyramid" of information. In this structure, the lede paragraph succinctly conveys the crucial information first, then the reader can learn more details by reading the rest of the article. Wikipedia has an acceptable summary of the technique, but they naively suggest that the format is used in online news. Perhaps that was true several years ago, but not anymore. Sadly, with the advent of click-tracking and monetization based on dwell-time, scrolling, and inter-article advertisements, it's rare to encounter a properly inverted pyramid. Today, you're…