Inverting the Inverted Pyramid

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Perhaps you’re familiar with the inverted pyramid, the journalism style that begins with the facts of the story and tapers down to less important details near the end.

Well, suffer under the tyranny of the pyramid no longer! Now, you can install another Greasemonkey script to escape the pyramid by completely flipping it: Invert Inverted Pyramid.

More specifically, the script will reverse the order of news paragraphs on the following websites (I tried to include the most popular): The New York Times, Yahoo! News, BBC, CNN, Google’s hosted AP articles, The Guardian, and Reuters.

Reading news is sometimes interesting this way (indeed, I wouldn’t have written the script if I didn’t think this would be true). For example, an article about the Minnesota Senate recount opens:

“This is so accurate and has been done so carefully that the person with the least votes is going to say, ‘I’m disappointed, I’m sad, but I came in short this time,’” he said.

If you need a refresher on Greasemonkey, don’t forget about Prefetch Notifier!


An interesting little JavaScript oddity (that Ben encouraged me to note): this script works because appendChild will remove a node if it is already a child of the parent, and then append it; this lets the script just iterate through the paragraphs backward while appending them, which is kind of cool(?).

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