Ledes: Ledes I Liked

I'm happy to say that everybody did no worse than pretty good in this assignment, which in the past has been an ungraded piece of classwork. This year I'm going to give you some credit, though: you all get a boost to your overall quiz grade that's equivalent to 10 out of 10 on a single quiz. Which everybody could use.

On this first assignment, it was far less important that I grade you and more critical that you get used to writing in a journalistic style and under a newsroom-type deadline before it starts counting for something.

Still, I think you're right where you need to be. Let's look at some of the ledes I thought worked well:

Forty-three percent of American marriages break up within 15 years due to marrying young and being less religious, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

It identifies the most telling statistic, highlights it and provides a source for it. Nice work. This one collects a variety of factors:

Women who are wealthy, religious, college-educated, and at least 20 years old when they marry are less likely to get divorced, according to the Centers for Disease Control.


Next is this:

Mayor Datolli will introduce a new panhandling ordinance next week that will provide one-way bus tickets out of town to vagrants.

It has who: the mayor who is acting, and homeless people being acted upon (though is it okay to call them vagrants, or is that a stereotypical slur that should have been replaced with the term "homeless people"?). It has what: the mayor wanting to boot the homeless out of here. It has when: as soon as next week. It has how: one-way bus tickets for the homeless. Four of six W's are covered here, and in only 22 words.

Next is this:

A local swimming pool is being sued for extensive injuries to a local resident who claims swimming officials failed to warn him of immediate lightning danger last summer.

Again, it sums everything you need to know in a simple, straightforward way. This next lede -- which was done by my fall 2011 class, and not this one -- went a step further, and honed in on context:

Erik Barsh was going to be a senior tennis star until last summer when he was struck by lightning. Now he is in a legal volley with the city.

This is a more complex type of lede known by various terms, including a delayed lede (where the lede sets up a following nut graf that reads more like a basic lede) and an anecdotal lede (where in this case you are humanizing the subject a bit before plunging into the reason why this particular human is worthy of news coverage).

I didn't plan for you guys doing anything beyond a basic lede for this exercise, and it's fine that you did not. We'll talk about alternate ledes and as the term goes on I'll encourage you to try more complex forms of story-telling. But if you want to fall back on the basic lee structure for now, that's perfectly fine. What I want to see you demonstrate for now is proper identification and fact selection. And a basic lede does that just fine.


Now, there are some things missing from these and other ledes, like proper use of the word allegedly, and proper attribution use and style. But since we haven't learned those things yet, you weren't docked. And we'll get to learning those things very soon.