Exploring the Paradox: How Social Media and Journalism Clash in Narrative Structure

You guys the person that runs the cult that I am in personally is my 16 year old sister she’s the coolest person I know Oh my god was that not the most interestingly structured sentence of all time and in a weird way it kind of explains why social media and traditional journalism are at odds let me explain – Anastazia, in this TikTok, basically takes a very simple concept – “my sister is cool” – and adds like the most interesting words at the beginning of the sentence to make it like the most shocking sentence possible “the person that runs the CULT that I’m in – is my 16 year old sister” I have a master’s degree in journalism and one of the concepts that they teach in journalism school for writing news articles is something called the inverted pyramid okay this basically puts the most basic facts of a news story like, who, what where, when, why, at the beginning of the story and slowly get into more and more detail as you go down the article basically if somebody stops reading at any point in the article, they still know the basic facts of what happened On social media, your goal is to just hook the viewer at the beginning even if it’s not the full true story just by the most shocking thing possible you could say that’s why no one wants to read traditional journalism anymore once they get used to these like shocking like dopamine hits it’s really hard to return mentally to the inverted pyramid format of receiving information