The Telegraph, Bandwidth, and the News Story

abstract:Transmitting information as electrical impulses favored such story qualities as brevity, an inverted-pyramid structure, and a muted authorial voice. Historians often ascribe these attributes to the narrow bandwidth of early telegraphy, overlooking decades of innovation that expanded its information-carrying capacity. This article argues that telegraphic story qualities lodged in journalism when the network delivered too much, not too little, information. The news industry discovered that a story's telegraphic qualities contributed to the efficiency of processing texts and suited marketing. Journalists and journalism educators embraced telegraphic style as a reporter's stock-in-trade that distinguished newswriting from other forms of presenting information.