Posts in category Leads

Lead Writing

Jul06
2012 Leave a Comment Written by hhanks

Great Lead Writing

One of my favorite leads of all time comes from one of my students:

“It ‘s in the Happy Meals, the Lunchables, and the lunch line. It’s in the frozen dinners and on the delivery pizza. The main course, the samples at the food court, the cook out at a picnic. But the one place meat wasn’t: Averi Edwards’ plate.”

-Ashly Shay “Fueled by Fruit,” 2011 Minotaur

So often stories about vegetarians have leads that preach, use bad puns or focus on the ubitquitous “you.” Here she plays with the mysteriousness of the food item, letting it presence tease the reader. In the third sentence, she turns it around it a specific subject, naming the item as meat. In this way she avoids the biases some students may have about vegetarianism. By the time they’ve read to this sentence, they’re hooked by the play with words and indulged to keep reading.

“Her weight’s gone up. Gray hairs have sprouted. She’s gotten used to flat shoes instead of heels and eggplant-shaped dresses instead of the gowns and furs she used to wear. But after a decade in prison for having her husband killed, Betty Lou Haber, closing in on 50, is still as polite and sweet sounding as ever.

“There’s never a night that I go to bed and don’t say my prayers,” she said last week. “I just do the best I can.”

And that’s why Albert Haber’s surviving children are worried.”

“A murder story” by David Finkel
St.Petersburg Times, May 26, 1985

From ASNE’s gallery of award winning leads, this lead takes a scene that seems obvious, a sweet old lady aging, and complicates the character in the third sentence by mentioning that she had her husband murdered. The next sentence, a direct quote embodying the sweet old lady role, pushes the character a little further. This leads to the suspense in the next paragraph, where the children are worried. Here the presence of worry challenges the reader’s perception of this character, inspiring them to read on and judge further.

This article contains more great leads, but they’re from 1923. The language is different, but they still do a great job of creatively grabbing the reader’s interest.

This article finds six great leads in the New York Times all in one day.

Thoughts on Lead Writing

“I search for a lead. I guess I’ve always been a believer that if I’ve got two hours in which to do something, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and 45 minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily.”
N. Don Wycliff, Chicago Tribune

Sometimes the most difficult part of writing is just getting started. In that sense, the lead is the most difficult part of writing. It should be worth investing the time into writing.

“Don’t bury your lead…The hook, the thing that makes the reader interested in reading the story. Hit them with the news, the peg? Why are you writing this story? What’s it all about?”
Mark Fritz, The Associated Press

This idea goes back to the question: “Who cares?” If the reader doesn’t understand what the article is about, then the lead isn’t effective. There’s no incentive to read on.

“My advice to young people is to know your ending before you start writing.”
Ken Fuson, The Baltimore Sun

The lead is only part of the organization of the article. Whether the article uses an inverted pyramid or feature style organization, the writer needs to know where the story is going to go so they can carefully craft it. These quotes on leads and more like them can be found here.

This article contains some great ideas on helping to find that great lead and, ultimately, the story itself.

Lead Writing Resources

NewsU.org has an interactive training session called “The Lead Lab” with instructional content by Chip Scanlan on lead writing. In the course, students learn about the basics of lead writing, while getting the chance to manipulate and create leads and reading some inspiring examples.

This video from cubjournalism.com features Marist College Professor Mark Grabowski introducing leads to young journalists.

On hsj.org, there is a lesson plan on lead writing created by Susan Fergueson. It includes worksheets and clear direction for students to improve their lead writing skills.

Good leads fit story

Jul06
2012 Leave a Comment Written by jphillips

Writing a lead is a tough job for beginning reporters. Stories are in competition for readers’ time. Teaching students to write leads that grab the reader is no small feat. A good lead is critical to catching readers’ interest. Some leads follow the age-old inverted pyramid which is suited for hard news. Other leads use other narratives and literary devices to tell the story. Great leads are specific to the theme and mood of the story.

Times photo: Chris Zuppa
The loneliness of the overnight shift at a Suncoast Parkway toll booth: Lloyd Blair, 71, sits back and waits for the next driver to come by his station.

Brady Dennis of the St. Petersburg Times writes 300-word stories. They don’t follow the inverted pyramid format. However, they are compelling. One such story, “After the Sky Fell,” is a descriptive narrative. It paints a scene and then explains how the scene came to be. After the lead, followed by, “here’s why…” the reader is hooked. It tells a story of a man. This man wasn’t always working a lonely shift at a toll booth. It becomes a love story and examines one plot of the human condition. Human interest makes this a good story, one that is well-written.

Another good lead from the Tampa Bay Times is from a special report about a boys’ state school in Marianna, Fla. It sets a chilling scene as if it were some Southern Gothic tale. “The men remember the same things: blood on the walls…” It captures the horror and pathos of a decades-old story. The investigation is ongoing and the Times ran a nice online package. It was unusual in its breadth and depth for an online piece. Its length may turn off readers but those interested in the investigation or others similar to it will find it riveting. Its newsworthiness element involves conflict and the story of children, one of the weakest segments of society.

This New York Times story is about the Western wildfires. Jack Healy does a great job leading into this modern story of the West.

Photo: Matthew Staver for The New York Times
Nearly every building on the 60-year-old Flying W Ranch burned to cinders.


Paralleling cowboy songs of love, labor and losses, Healy describes the loss as it hits a note of fear in each home owner.

An adequate inverted pyramid lead in the Star-Telegram is about the Fort Worth police’s crime lab. It gives basic information about the lab resuming work on Monday. It’s local news and gives the pertinent facts to readers.

In addition to types, leads vary in quality. In the Fort Worth Star-Telegram story about another earthquake in Texas, writer Jessamy Brown quotes the U.S. Geological Survey and uses Star-Telegram archives to explain the event. It includes lots of dates and geological information which are useful. However, there’s not a quote from any observers or survivors.

This Star-Telegram story is not about birds, bird watching or ornithologists. It’s about a library. The lead seems disconnected other than by geography to the library story. It’s a neat story about a literacy movement involving small, free libraries in neighborhoods. A better lead could have written about finding “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Fifty Shades of Grey,” or “Old Yeller” in a tiny spot.

Leads need to fit the story. Sometimes that will be the inverted pyramid. Sometimes it will be a different narrative.

Brady Dennis

Writing good leads

Jul05
2012 Leave a Comment Written by tduryea

Writing a lead can be the most difficult part of writing an article. As we have seen throughout this semester, it is so easy to fall in clichés. This is especially true for young journalists who really want to write an interesting lead but don’t have the experience. I once read that the lead captures the essence of the story. This is a useful way to think, especially since leads should be as widely varied as the stories they introduce. Following are some examples of leads from different kinds of stories.

This first example is from an excellent article published in The New York Times last year. The article is a dramatic story about the death of Farai Kujirichita at the hands of a mob. Rather than introduce the man first, reporter Barry Bearak allows the reader to be inserted into the scene that leads to Kujirichita’s death. Bearak decided that the events and the emotions surrounding the event were the essence of the story, and this lead captures that.

This lead, from an article written by Ron Clark for CNN, serves a much different purpose. Clark is a teacher and an author, but not a journalist. Regardless, he manages to use the lead to introduce his story in a compelling way. Because Clark is somewhat of an expert on the topic, he inserts himself into the lead. While this is usually a bad idea for journalists, I believe it works here. He uses this anecdote to introduce the topic, which is the problem of dealing with students’ parents.

This article from The New Yorker takes yet another approach. Written by Lawrence Wright, the article comes in at just under 25,000 words (I hope he was paid by the word). The lead, which probably could be considered longer than just first two sentences, introduces the people and story in a relatively straightforward manner. This is ok in this situation, because anybody investing the time to read this needs to have a clear picture of the topic and content. It is not without a bit of drama, as Wright quickly introduces the rift between the Church of Scientology and one of its former members.

I was happy to find a cliché lead, even if it had to be from one of my favorite news sources. This article, written by Barbara Bradley Hagerty for NPR.com, looks into an orthodox push by the Roman Catholic Church. The worst thing about ‘the line in the sand’ is that it doesn’t even seem to fit with the content of the article. In the article, it seems that the church is making a conservative push and fighting against more liberal policies. This infers that ‘the line’ has already been crossed and now is the time for action. A more appropriate but still just as cringeworthy cliché would have been, “The Catholic Church comes out swinging.” Here is a of cliché leads that could be useful for showing students what not to do.

Leads: The good, the bad and the ugly

Jul03
2012 Leave a Comment Written by nclemens

Leads are tough. They set the tone. They have to give the right information in the right dose. They have to draw in the readers. They have to answer the 5 Ws or have a good reason they don’t. That’s a lot to ask of 30 or so words.

The Poynter Institute discusses “the power of leads” here.  Included on this page are several examples of award-winning leads, including the following from “After Life of Violence Harris Goes Peacefully” by Sam Stanton for The Sacramento Bee, April 22, 1992.

SAN QUENTIN—In the end, Robert Alton Harris seemed determined to go peacefully, a trait that had eluded him in the 39 violent and abusive years he spent on earth.

Why does this lead work?

  • It breaks all the right rules.  It is not chronological, it does not focus only on imparting the most information possible, it does not follow the inverted pyramid exactly.  But, this story is a feature, which calls for the bending of these journalism rules in creating a high-quality piece which evokes emotion and creates a story which invites the reader to continue reading.  It is obvious that the reporter knows the rules and makes a conscious decision to break them.
  • At the same time, the lead does begin to answer several of those 5 W questions including who, what, and, to an extent, how.
  • The lead starts the story at the end.  It explicitly tells the reader by using the phrase “in the end”.  This invites the reader to continue reading to find out the story behind this final event.  The reader is left with questions about Harris’ violent past, death and why he was “determined to go peacefully.”
  • There is a compelling story here.  This man has an interesting story to tell.  The lead suggests just that.

 

The New York Times article “One Man’s Trash…” has a lead which creates a vivid picture for the reader.

AMONG the traditional brick and clapboard structures that line the streets of this sleepy East Texas town, 70 miles north of Houston, a few houses stand out: their roofs are made of license plates, and their windows of crystal platters.

The article about a couple who has made it their new mission to build homes for low-income people using recycled and salvaged materials.  Failing to appeal to the reader’s sense of sight in creating a picture of what these homes look like would be tragic.  The depictions of the homes continue to pop up throughout the story.

Like the previous example, this lead answers one of the 5 W questions.  This time, however, it is answered more explicitly.  The where is “the streets of this sleepy East Texas town, 70 miles north of Houston.”  The who, which is relayed in the second paragraph, is less important than the why, how, or “so what?” of this story.  Leaving the names of this couple to a subsequent paragraph lets the reader understand this.  The story is not about the couple, but about what they do.

This YouTube video, apparently created by students of journalism at Ohio University includes five short video clips and potential leads for stories about each.

Leads

For the most part, these leads miss the mark.  For example, the second lead scenario includes a clip of a man playing a piano on the sidewalk.  He is wearing a large hat and bobbing up and down as he plays an energetic tune.

The proposed lead is “Rick the piano man is a Court Street regular.”  This does not do justice to the scene presented in the clip.  Yes, it tells us the who, the what and the where.  But it is dry and lifeless, the exact opposite of what I see in this clip.  The disconnect between the scene and the lead makes it ineffective.  The lead does not capture the story that is waiting to be told.  As a reader, I have no desire to continue reading a story with this lead.  However, after watching the video clip, I would love to know more about Rick the piano man.

This video could be a great classroom exercise in writing leads.  A class could analyze the existing leads, propose other leads, and, hopefully, notice the difficulty of writing leads without having all the information from quality research and interviews.

Finally, George Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing was not created specifically with journalistic writing in mind.  Yet, these rules, especially bonus rule number 6 apply to journalism, and specifically lead writing, quite well.

 

Lead by example

Jul01
2012 Leave a Comment Written by jderryberry

When instructing on leads, I think it’s important to provide a variety of examples and discuss the different approaches – beyond the basic who, what, where, when, why, how – to help students craft creative and appropriate leads dependent on the content of their stories.

Both the readings this week and the lecture indicate questions should be avoided.  Adam Maksl cautioned leads assume people care when they may not.

That being said, I think there are times when questions may lead students to address the “So what?” and/or the “What’s next?” in a story.  While it may be more beneficial to coach them to provide the answer to the question rather than the question itself, the lead in “Stocks face questions entering 2nd half of ’12” is a lead that uses a question to allude to the “So what?” as well as the unanswerable “What’s next?”

Another potentially problematic lead style is the multiple-element lead.  Complex stories create difficultly narrowing down and prioritizing information.  This becomes more difficult when striving to provide readers answers to not only “What?” but also “So what?” and “What next?”  The lead for “In Presidential Vote, Mexicans Have Eye on a Tainted Past”, the writer not only addresses the election, but also the winning party’s past and the troubling issues in the present that may explain the win. The lead is descriptive enough to relay the main event in the election and provide deeper meaning and context while remaining concise and readable.

A simple lead,  “Defending champions Spain win Euro 2012 to complete historic treble” uses the novelty of the three successive wins to provide greater impact to the basic lead relaying the winning team and final score.  While not every sporting event or game may have a historic outcome, it’s important to help students find the novel aspect of the story to keep from falling into formulaic writing.

The screenshots of the headlines and leads in this post provide opportunity for a note about how leads are used online to create a scannable and searchable snippet of stories’ content.  When websites try to put too much of a story’s content in the splash page lead, confusion can result.  The actual lead for “Eastern US continues to swelter; power outages could last days” is descriptive and clear.  The splash page version, however, makes no sense.

As a side note, the stories I linked in this post are likely to be updated. I’ve included the screenshots to provide access to the leads I referenced.