The three chapters are mainly about how to set up the news structure and write for the website.
I first knew the pyramid structure from a book named The art and crafted of feature writing, which my college professor recommended in the first writing class. The writer is a journalist from The Wall Street Journal. It will be very interesting and easy to read for audience if journalists can use the pyramid structure properly especially when writing investigative news. But it really requires good storytelling skills.
I feel that writing good news for the website is actually a big challenge. When I was a senior, I wrote financial news for NetEase, one of the biggest online news company in China, for one month. I had to read the financial report immediately when it comes out around 5 p.m. everyday. Then I needed to find the most useful part, came up with some questions and interviewed experts to explain them. After that, I would write a 500 words news and sent it to the editor before 6:10 p.m. in order to compete with other news websites. It was a very stressful. I could not even think about the structure stuff since I did't have time to revise it. So usually the quality of the website news is not as good as that of tradition media. And it may contain some mistakes.
However, the online news does have many advantages. For example, when CNN reported MH370 this year, the first news came out immediately after they confirmed the news from the official department. It was just a brief introduction about the event. But they kept updating their news almost every hour to deepen them. Also, they provided links to earlier stories and created a web page for this event. People who were interested in the event could get all the information when they went to the web page. Although there were some wrong information during the reporting procedure, their quick reporting gained lots of audience.
The book also mentioned about how to keep news concisely. Now I'm struggling for that, especially writing in English. It's still a long way to go.
Lei, you have first-hand experience with high pressure, deadline reporting. And, as you say, the faster something is published the more likely it is to contain errors. Now there's something to remember when reading live Tweets.
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