4.

1: Writing the Lead

The straight news lead - the news-service lead - is one sentence of no more than 35 words and no
more than one comma. That probably sounds too rigid, and it is, but a writer who aims to meet those
criteria will produce a cleaner lead than a writer who doesn't. A straight news lead - and a news
article - is objective: that means it does not take sides and is fair to all sides, regardless of the
reporter's personal opinions. (By the way, "lead" is often rendered as "lede" by journalists so it
cannot be confused with the strips of lead (the leading) used to space out the lines of type back when
type was something heavy that you could drop on your toe, not ones and zeroes in a computer file.)

The lead must contain all the essential information of the article so a hurried reader, or a reader not
particularly interested in the topic, can quickly grasp the essentials and move on. Many journalism
guides and texts say the lead should also make the reader want to read on to learn the details of the
article. Yes, reporters believe that the articles they write are important and worth the readers' time,
but in truth, no one expects all readers, or even any readers, to read all of every article. That's why
articles have headlines and newspapers are divided into sections - to help each reader find the articles
of particular interest. The journalist should respect the reader's time and certainly not try to draw the
reader into an article under false pretenses. That practice usually leads to sensationalism, one of the
most justly denounced sins of the profession. While publishers may see journalism as a way to make
money, writers and editors consider journalism to be first and foremost a service.

The form of the lead sentence is the straightforward declarative sentence, usually with the verb in
simple past tense: subject-verb-object. Use the active voice rather than the passive voice. It is more
forceful. One common exception involves traffic and other fatalities. The standard form in this case
is: "Three people were killed on Tuesday. " The intransitive-verb construction, "Three people died.
..." would also be acceptable. Another exception to the avoid-the-passive-voice rule is found in the
standard police article: "Two people were arrested. " An alternative approach begins with the
police: "The police arrested two people. "

Don't clutter up the lead, or the article, with adjectives and adverbs. Adjectives add color and
description, yes, but writing that employs vivid verbs and telling details is much more powerful than
writing that leans heavily on modifiers. And a great deal of objectivity can be lost and bias
introduced through the use of adjectives and adverbs.

Articles need attribution, and leads often do as well. Unless the reporter personally observes the
event, the article is based on what the reporter learned from some person or some document. Those
people and documents need to be cited in attribution because that helps the reader evaluate the
reliability of the information. If the most important statement of the article, the lead, is based on
information that should be attributed, the lead must contain that attribution.

Usually, the source of the information is not as important as the information itself, so it goes at the
end of the sentence, rather than at the front. The usual form is: subject-verb-object, time element
(when the event happened) and attribution.

Don't use unfamiliar names in the lead. The principle behind this rule is that readers find it easier to
grasp a lot of information quickly if you begin with something they know or will recognize and then
add the unfamiliar details later. So a reporter writing for the local metropolitan paper writes a lead
like this, "A local high school girl won the national 200-meter freestyle championship on Tuesday."
Readers who have even the slightest interest in the subject will read on, at least through the second
paragraph, which would elaborate and add detail: "The student, Mary Jones, a senior at Central High.
" But the Central High online newspaper carries an article that starts, "Mary Jones won the 200-
meter freestyle national title on Tuesday." Everyone at Central High, or at least everyone interested
in the swimming team, knows Mary Jones by name.

Tell the readers in the lead when the event being covered happened. That "when" dimension of an
article is called a time element. Articles that describe a trend often have no specific time element
because they concern something that is continuing. In that case, having a progressive ("is beginning")
or present perfect ("has begun") verb obviates the need for a specific time element. Here's an
example from a New York Times article by William Glaberson:

The role of the American jury, the central vehicle for citizen participation in the legal system, is
being sharply limited by new laws, court rulings and a legal culture that is moving away from trials
as a method of resolving disputes.

Modifiers should always be as close to what they modify as possible; the time element is an adverb,
so it should be close to the verb it modifies. When a reporter is writing for a daily publication,
"today" means the day of publication and "yesterday" and "tomorrow" mean the day before and the
day after publication. Daily papers use the day of the week for days that are more than a day away
from the time of publication but not more than a week away. Days more than seven days away from
the day of publication get a date, like Jan. 1 or June 23. But what about online school papers, which
will not be daily (at least not at first), and which will contain articles posted on different days?

School staffs may adopt different conventions, and any of them are fine as long as they are easy for
the reader to figure out. One approach is to make sure that each article carries the posting date at the
top, and then follow the convention used by daily newspapers, outlined in the previous paragraph.
Another approach is to use just the date, but that may leave the reader musing, "Today's Wednesday
the 12th and the article says this happened on the 7th, so that was five days ago so it must have been.
..." Another strategy is to use the date and the day of the week, saying something happened, for
example, on Friday, May 13. That means that writers and editors need to be careful about the words
"today," "yesterday" or "next Friday" in quotations because they may be confusing. If the context
doesn't make them clear, the writer may need to paraphrase the quotation (taking off the quotation
marks but still attributing the material) to make the reference clear.

The most important thing to know about a news article or a news lead is the following: Put the news
at the beginning. That rule is so important that it often trumps the active-voice rule in police articles.
That's why "Three people were arrested. " is often better than "The police arrested three people.
" The police almost always do the arresting, so the fact that it was police officers who made an
arrest would be unlikely to be the most important part of an article. If a bank teller performs a
citizens' arrest during a robbery attempt, the fact that the teller did the arresting is worth putting at the
beginning of the lead.
If who is speaking is the most important piece of information, as is often the case when a prominent
person is speaking, put the speaker first. Here's an example of that: If a grumpy sophomore walked
down the hall muttering, "I hate school," it wouldn't be worth mentioning in the Web paper. But if
the principal did the same thing, the principal's prominence would make the statement newsworthy.

When what the speaker said is the most important thing, put that first, followed by the attribution. If
the time element is the most important thing, put that first. But the time element is rarely the most
important thing in an article, which is why it is usually a mistake to begin by saying, "On Tuesday.
"

On the first day of the Stuyvesant summer workshop, the authors spent an hour or two going over
expectations for the month, then spent some time going over these points of how to write a news
lead. The students then wrote leads based on what had happened that morning. What follows are four
leads the students wrote, followed by the professional critiques. Before looking at the critiques, try to
see which leads follow the above rules, and which need work.