COMM 337: Newswriting review -- the lede

I've decided we have two groups of people in Communications 337 who could use a quick-and-dirty review of COMM 209 (basic newswriting), at least the part on how to write a lede and "hang" a story from it.

First, the two types of people:

Students who haven't had COMM 209 yet and haven't studied how to organize a news story. The inverted pyramid is the basic building block.

Students who've had COMM 209 and have forgotten how to organize a news story. The inverted pyramid -- of course -- is still the basic building block.

Actually, now that I think of it, there's a third category:

Students who've had COMM 209, who remember the inverted pyramid and still could benefit from a review. And it goes without saying the inverted pyramid -- I'll bet you can see this coming by now -- is still the basic building block.

I think that covers all of us. So here goes.

For my money, the best, clearest explanation for beginners is by Lawrence Surtees of the Toronto Globe and Mail on the "SSN Newsroom" website for Canadian journalism students. Read it carefully, several times, too, and you'll understand how to organize a news story. You'll also start developing a feel for when to use a hard lede, when to use a soft lede and how to craft a lede that introduces the key elements of the rest of the story. Surtees also has an excellent tip sheet on "How to Write a Great News Story" that goes into this business of hard and soft news stories in a little more detail. I've assigned it once already, but it wouldn't hurt to read it again.

Here's something I learned from my first city editor, the late Dick Smyser of The Oak Ridger, a daily in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Dick told us to think of four or five keywords that had to be in the story. "Four die in flash flood," or "City council raises taxes." Those words would be in the lede.

Here's another link. A journalism student named David Cohn has an explanation of why some of us spell it "lede" in his blog DigiDave. It's basically so you don't get "lead" (the leading part of the story) it confused with "lead" (the metal). Cohn also has an example of what "Little Red Riding Hood" would look like with a hard news lede:

"A 10-year-old girl and her bed-ridden grandmother escaped death yesterday after a woodsman hacked open a cross-dressing wolf that swallowed them whole."

Try it. Choose a fairy tale or well-known story, and write a hard-news lede for it. Post it as a comment to this blog.