"I Can't Hear You When You're Talking!"

We spent a lot of time in class on Monday night discussing ledes. A lede is the all-important first line of a news story. It’s supposed to hook the reader and invite them in for more information. It’ll answer some of the who, what, when, where, why and how questions, while leaving more to be discovered further in the story.

It may seem like an easy thing—writing a sentence to get someone’s attention at the beginning of a news story. I am quickly learning, however, that “easy” does not fit very well into the equation for someone taking her first class on writing for the media. There isn’t really one perfect way to write a lede sentence. It will depend on the story and on what you determine to be the most important elements of that story. My class received a good tip on how to determine the most important points to include in a lede: think about how you would tell the information to a friend right after the event happened. For example, I would be willing to bet that no one summarizing what they’d seen on MTV’s “Video Music Awards” would start with a run down on who won the award for best art direction, best choreography, or even the video of the year. Instead, you would have referred to the most unanticipated and, um, exciting event of the evening: Kanye West’s upstaging of Taylor Swift as she tried to accept her award for best female video.

Of course, how you verbalize or construct your lede may vary. Just as there may be a variety of ways to write a good lede sentence, there are also plenty of ways to screw them up. One that I’d like to discuss briefly is the idea of “burying the lede.” This is what you would have done had you decided to begin your summary of the VMA’s with information about the winner for best choreography instead of mentioning the Kanye-Swift debacle. For some reason this particular mistake really stuck out to me when my professor brought it up. I think it may have something to do with the great visual of an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand that comes immediately to my mind when I hear that phrase. It also brings me back to the title of this blog. I recently overheard an individual that I work with exclaim at one point during a phone conversation, “I can’t hear you when you’re talking!” Although I don’t know for sure what my client meant when she said that, I'm positive that it did not have to do with the volume of her friend's voice as even I could hear that he was speaking. I have a suspicion that she was trying to tell her friend that he was, in a sense, “burying his lede.” Perhaps he was trying to get a point across that was getting lost in a jumble of words or stutters. In a similar way, if the most important information somehow fails to make it into the lede or isn’t mentioned until the end of the sentence… then consider it buried.