Basic Ledes: Fatals Are No Fun

In this assignment, the way I graded you was that for each completed lede-- no matter how strong or weak -- I gave you a grade equal to getting 10 out of 10 correct on a current events quiz, so doing this assignment should have given you the equivalent of three perfect quiz scores.

This is one of the very few times you'll get a grade just for effort, rather than performance. That's not how we'll grade such assignments going forward, but I wanted to make this first one a bit light in terms of your final grade.

The exception to the grade was if you had a fatal. A fatal is what we call a significant fact error, including incorrect premises, incorrectly spelled names, incorrect titles, misspellings that create a change in meaning, quotes with any inaccuracies contained within, incorrect statistics, incorrect telling facts like the day of the week, the time something occurred, wrong location, ect.

And the way we'll score fatals going forward is that it automatically makes your assignment grade to a 1.0. That's not to be an ass about it; it's because in journalism it's critical that we get our facts right.

In this assignment, I gave you a bit of a break. Instead of you biffing on the whole assignment, for each part of the assignment in which you fataled I gave you a quiz score equal to getting 3 out of 10 right.

Now, the way we learn to avoid getting fatals is to get fatals. Then, we learn why we fataled and what we could have done to avoid that fatal. Then, we apply those lessons going forward.

To that end, this semester we will review by blog every fatal done by the class, in hopes of not only keeping that person from making that mistake, but also to share those hard lessons so that others don't make such a mistake in the first place.

And now we start:

We had two fatals in this lede:

Two children, ages 5 and 3, burned to death after accidentally setting their Maldren Avenue house on fire Saturday evening, police said.

Structurally, this lede is fine. It was a no-brainer 10 or 10 if the facts all checked out.But there are two big fact errors.

First, the kids did not burn to death. According to the information you were give, they died from heat and smoke, not burning.

Second, your sources were firefighters, not police. Police officers are not firefighters, and vice versa.

Two other ledes didn't fatal, but really missed a major premise of the story. Here's one of 'em:

East Lansing firefighters responded to a call at 9:15 p.m. last night when a local college student suffered second-degree burns while babysitting due to a faulty smoke detector.

First, the news isn't that firefighters responded to a call; it's what the call was: a house fire. We never say there was a house fire.

We need to be thinking end result. After all, we wouldn't write a sports story with a lede of, MSU played a football game against Ohio State, right? We'd write MSU beat Ohio State, 107-0. And in this case, we'd concentrate not that firefighters showed up, but what they showed up to: a house fire.

Second, we never got to the most significant end result; not that the babysitter was badly hurt, but that two children died. That's a huge miss! Death trumps injury, right?

Again, it's okay that we're making some mistakes in this class. That's how we learn. Let's just make sure we do really learn from these examples, okay?