There hasn’t been much talk about the Social Media News Release (SMNR) lately. It must be time to stimulate some discussion.

When I was in journalism school (California State University Northridge, 1972-1976), the inverted pyramid was a staple of newswriting classes. The way it was taught to me made perfect sense: If somebody reads only the lede paragraph, they should walk away knowing the most important information in the story, the typical assembly of the who-what-when-where-why information. If she reads through the second graph, she’s now consumed content that is almost as important for the understanding of the story. As she reads more of the article, the information gets increasingly detailed. Wherever she chooses to stop, she’ll have absorbed the most critical information and left less important content unread.

The inverted pyramid is ideal for a linear print world. As the practice of public relations became more common, press releases adopted the inverted pyramid so editors could drop the release unchanged into their publications, chopping off as much of the end of the article as necessary to accommodate the space available.

As publications concentrate on web platforms, however, the linear approach doesn’t work, although it makes more sense than ever to lead with the five Ws. Adding link curation to the mix, being cognizant of ads appearing alongside stories that create unintended context, the use of other web-based content in pursuit of a balanced story and a host of other factors all need to be stirred into the mix.

It turns out that the journalism department at Rutgers has been teaching a new pyramid for the last seven years, an approach that could easily find its way into other journalism schools. Benjamin Davis—a new media news professor who was part of the MSNBC.com launch team—explained the pyramid in a piece he wrote for the Online Journalism Review.

Johnson calls the Digital Media Pyramid an enhancement rather than a replacement of the inverted pyramid:

It provides for the traditional brief introduction of facts (the five Ws) which are boldly separated from all supporting details. Yet the Digital Media Pyramid also addresses the need to surf the Internet for additional supporting information by permitting and explaining cut-and-pasting rules.

The pyramid covers the use of multimedia, interactivity and other non-text elements of a news story and creates awareness of ads that could be inappropriate beside the article. It also “encourages the self-eductaion of ‘users’ or readers, enabling them to quickly seek out balanced information on a news story through the use of embedded links, social neetworks and other resources.”

The Digital Media Pyramid should, Johnson argues, “find a place in the newsrooms and journalism classrooms around the globe.”

If it does, PR practitioners employing the Social Media News Release will be in good shape. The elements of the SMNR lend themselves nicely to this news-production model, with tags and links designed to assist a report conducting research, digital assets available to incorporate into a story and news facts ready to be turned into a solid 5W lede. One more compelling reason to start using the SMNR as the population of employed journalists begins to skew younger.

Does the Digital Media Pyramid work for you?