For the journalism junkies
December 4, 2007 | 9:15 am
The blog has gotten deprived in recent weeks primarily (but not solely) because of end-of-semester teaching commitments. For the sake of posting something (that will only be interesting to the two of my 10 regular readers who are also reformed newspaper people), I’m sharing notes from a lecture I did last week on writing ledes. It’s from my Journalistic Essay class, which I have, for the most part, been teaching as a combined intro to journalism/magazine feature writing class.
Ledes
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
- H.L. Mencken
Ledes (or leads) are the introduction of a story – the place where you grab a reader’s attention and try to entice her to read your work. It is more art than science and for many people it is the most difficult part of writing nonfiction. Some people will spend hours or even days tweaking their ledes to perfection, and while most writers won’t fight an editor who tries to change other parts of a story, rewriting a lede can be cause for bloodshed. The incorrect spelling emerged as a way to differentiate the intro of a story from the lead type that was once used to print newspapers.
A lede is your contract with the reader – you are making promises and, in return, the reader is agreeing to read your article. Don’t break that contract and your reader will live up to her end.
Some awful ledes I have seen in my career….
“A few years back, Bobby McFarren wrote a hit song called ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.†That’s what Pittsburgh City Councilwoman Valerie McDonald was telling her colleagues during Tuesday’s budget hearing.â€
“If you build it, they will come.â€
– lede used by almost every reporter who ever had to write a story about proposals to build a publicly-financed sports stadium. This is the cousin to the lede/term paper intro that begins with “Websters New World Dictionary defines…â€
“Little Jimmy liked to swim. Little Jimmy won’t be swimming anymore.â€
– lede from a story about an eight-year-old boy who had drowned.
And even I’ll own up to writing my share of bad ledes, like this gem from 1998: “Wastewater happens. What happens to waste water was the topic of a three-hour Plymouth Board of Selectmen meeting Monday night.â€
(It makes me cringe even more than I should knowing that I actually “successfully†argued with an editor who tried to change it).
Whether you are writing the traditional newspaper lede – which summarizes the entire story in 35, or, preferably, 25 or less – or you are writing a multi-paragraph anecdotal lede for a feature story, you need to be efficient and capture the essence of the story. Remember the old commercial with the slogan “You only get one chance to make a first impression� This is journalism’s first impression.
Every place you work, and every writer and editor within in that place, will have their own rules of what makes a good lede. Some people swear by only using hard news ledes. Feature writers will often shun hard leads and go for the narrative, anecdotal lead. Ledes will also vary in length – I’ve written leads as short as one word and as long as several pages, depending on the assignment. Most people find they need to use a combination of both in the context of a career.
I have my own rules for what makes a good and bad ledes, but none are more important than the same rule I use for structure and most other aspects of my writing: Do what makes sense.
I’m not going to throw a “cute†or overly dramatic lede on top of a story about a boy who has drowned (although I may interview his parents and look for that sentimental scene). Nor am I going to write a meandering, anecdotal lede when I’m writing breaking business news for stock traders, who need their information delivered quickly and clearly. I don’t want to alienate readers who are not familiar with the hit tunes of Bobby McFarren or may not have seen the “Shit Happens†t-shirts that were popular in the 1990’s. Clichés are a sign of lazy writing, so, to use a cliché of my own, there’s no way in hell it’s getting into the top of my story.
Because we have primarily focused on features in this class, let’s talk about the soft lede (with the hard lede being the “just the facts†lede you’re likely to see in breaking news stories on the Internet or in a newspaper the day after a news event). It’s also known as the anecdotal or narrative lede, and, for me, is one of the best parts of writing.
A good lede:
1. Captures the essence of the story. The shortest lede I ever wrote was for a story marking the 20th anniversary of the smiley face emoticon that is familiar to anyone who uses email on a regular basis. I wrote: “Smile. :-)â€
2. Piques a reader’s curiosity and tempts them to keep reading. For decades the rule in newspapers was that every lede had to include the who, what, where, why and how. Eventually, readers were conditioned to stop reading everything that came after the lede of a newspaper story. And then they stopped reading newspapers entirely.
3. Sets the tone of the story. Short bursts of words can create excitement, while a slow meandering lede can set a tone of sadness. You can create drama or levity, or you can set up a sense of mystery to entice readers to continue reading. But choose your tone carefully — the “Little Jimmy†lede doesn’t work because it was overly dramatic for a story that already had too much drama.
4. Knows its audience. One of my colossal failures in lede writing was a beautifully-crafted paragraph that alluded to Dickens’s A Tale Of Two Cities. Problem was I was covering a girl’s high school basketball game in a working class community. Make your lede accessible to all readers, but also keep in mind who your likely readers will be.
5. Raises questions without asking them. Lets agree here and now that we will never, ever write a question lede again. You want to pique a reader’s curiosity but you also want to assert that you are in control of the story and know what you are talking about.
Other things to keep in mind:
* Generally, lede with your best stuff – even if it means breaking chronological order of the structure you are using. The prologue of Blood & Volume, which was essentially the book’s lede, was the scene where Ron had just been arrested and was considering testifying and going into the witness protection program. Not only did it capture the essence of who he was is a person, but it was a crossroads in his life. I was then able to flashback and answer the question raised in the lede: How did this guy get in this place?
* That said, remember your contract: if you write a lede that promises the reader “literature in a hurry,†you’re obligated to write well throughout the piece. Don’t spend so much time crafting the perfect lede that the rest of your story is crap.
* Journalism junkies love to give all sorts of names to their ledes: there’s the summary lede, the delayed lede, the multiple element lede and countless other bits of jargon. And even I have used terms like soft and hard ledes and the anecdotal lede. The key is to not worry about labels: good writing is good writing, so do what makes sense for whatever story you’re working on.
So we’ve seen the bad ledes. What are good ledes?
Mysterious, compelling . . . it drew her in, and she was incapable of resisting its force. She gave herself over to the experience, rolling the words over on her tongue like wild blueberries and cream. It was the best lede she’d ever read, and she wanted to savor it.
- lede from an article on writing ledes
In the case of Sugar v. Forman, Cesar Millan knew none of the facts before arriving at the scene of the crime. That is the way Cesar prefers it. His job was to reconcile Forman with Sugar, and since Sugar was a good deal less adept in making her case than Forman, whatever he learned beforehand might bias him in favor of the aggrieved party.
- From The New Yorker, a story by Malcolm Gladwell about “the dog whisperer” Cesar Millan
“Werner Herzog, one of the masters of world cinema, was born in the small town of Schrang, near Munich, in 1942, in a section of Bavaria still dotted with storybook castles erected by the mad King Ludwig II.”
- article by Paul Cullum in the magazine StopSmiling: The Magazine for High-Minded Lowlifes
“Thomas Paine keeps staring at me from this old book, his nose bent to one side like an aged boxer’s. He’s had a tough life and an even tougher afterlife. I’ve spent the last few years pursuing his bones: they were stolen in 1819, and since then have reappeared everywhere from a New York sewage ditch to a Paris hotel room, with occasional stopovers inside statues and pieces of furniture. As I pursued the skull and bones of Paine, perhaps it was only a matter of time before I crossed paths with this book by Laurence Hutton, the man who once possessed Paine’s face . . . not to mention Franklin’s, Lincoln’s, and Aaron Burr’s faces too.”
- article by Paul Collins in The Believer magazine, titled “Let Us Now Gaze, Famous Men,” about a guide to rare books about death masks
Tags: Journalism, Teaching, Writing
Best Novels of the 20th Century » Blog Archive » For the journalism junkies wrote:
December 4, 2007 at 10:35 am
[...] For the journalism junkiesBy Dave CopelandMost people find they need to use a combination of both in the context of a career. I have my own rules for what makes a good and bad ledes, but none are more important than the same rule I use for structure and most other aspects of my …Dave Copeland - http://www.davecopeland.com [...]
Christine wrote:
December 4, 2007 at 12:35 pm
I hate ledes that pull some facet of pop culture totally unrelated and try to tie it in, a la:
“A few years back, Bobby McFarren wrote a hit song called ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.†That’s what Pittsburgh City Councilwoman Valerie McDonald was telling her colleagues during Tuesday’s budget hearing.â€
Christine/cgrrrl wrote:
December 4, 2007 at 3:09 pm
As one of those two regular readers who is also a former (and maybe future) journo, I’ll weigh in.
A friend once wrote a lede I thought was beautifully haunting. It stays with me today. “The big house is half empty now.” It was a story about two women who were killed in an auto accident. They had just purchased and moved into a home with their husbands. They two couples had yet to finish unpacking when the women went to the store for something I think and were killed on the way home. I pictured my friend interviewing the surviving spouses on the porch of the big house that they had all hoped to live in together.
And I wrote this lede after watching Donald Trump speak. “Sex.” I have to say I enjoyed writing that one.
And I definitely have my cringe moments remembering ledes I wrote that never should have made it into print. I won’t even bore you with those ones. There were too many.