Leads by example

I hope you enjoyed our last session's lead-writing exercises.

It might seem like a lot of effort to put into one topic area, but it mirrors the emphasis that professional journalists (and more importantly, their editors) place on writing a good lead. As we discussed last week, the lead is arguably the single most crucial aspect of a news story. It's common for reporters to spend 20 minutes or more just staring into space trying to find the right beginning for their stories. The lead sets the tone and rhythm for the rest of the story, and perfection of the skill should be one of your priorities.

Let's try a more interactive, long-term lead exercise. Many of us read newspapers and magazines both online and off, and we've all encountered examples of the main types of leads as identified by the Sue Barr handout.

Let's find other examples of those types of leads in our local and regional publications, and compile a list of them in a future post on this blog. Identifying leads, evaluating them and improving them should be a priority for you as a student of this course.


In the mean time, read some of these articles for great advice and insight into the lead-writing process.

Chip Scanlan at The Poynter Institute asks several industry heads to opine on the The Power of Leads.

Frank Soloman at BNet provides Ten Commandments for Writing Good Leads.

I know some of you are in marketing & communications, so here's an interesting guide to writing the lead paragraphs of press releases.

Finally (for now), here's a good companion piece to the Barr handout. It identifies different leads and provides some tips on writing them as well. It's available as a downloadable and printable PDF.



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One other minor point: Keep bringing your newspapers and clippings in the future.

We studied the active voice; the passive voice was also taught.

This week's lecture challenged a few of us, but we chipped away at it until we got it right.

I noted (with pleasure) that many of you are now casually evaluating the quality of leads. Knowledge of the active voice's importance will similarly change the way you read news stories. Inappropriately passive sentence will now jump out at you as you read the papers and, I hope, as you write your own stories.

Read through these guides to polish up on the initial lecture, or to catch up on what you missed.

The Active Voice at Purdue's excellent Online Writing Lab.

The Guide to Grammar & Writing focuses more on the Passive Voice, and features examples of its appropriate use.

Towson University digs deeper into the mechanics and provides a lot of examples.

Finally, take this Passive-to-Active quiz, and its Active-to-Passive counterpart, at About.com.

Journalism vs paparazzi...

We discussed the difference between mainstream journalists and paparazzi in our first class. We seemed to reach a consensus then, but I thought this column by film critic Roger Ebert could provide more food for thought.

I particularly agree with these sentiments:

The CelebCult virus is eating our culture alive, and newspapers voluntarily expose themselves to it. It teaches shabby values to young people, festers unwholesome curiosity, violates privacy, and is indifferent to meaningful achievement.

...

The celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out.

The news is still big. It's the newspapers that got small.

Highly subjective statements, sure. But they highlight the conflict between a newspaper's obligation to provide information that (it believes) people need, and information (some) people want.

Where do you stand in this debate?

Concerning diction

We briefly touched the need for diction in class. Diction can be loosely defined as finding the precisely right word for what you want to say. A writer named Rebecca Solnit wrote an interesting article in Guernica about when the media's use of words causes the world to get the wrong picture.

The piece asks some crucial questions that you should ask yourself as journalists, but I'll let you get to them and maybe we can discuss in class. But my favourite sentence?

"We live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right."

Desiree

Tips for assignment #1

Both Kayode and I as lecturers assessed your ideas for Assignment #1 this week. Some pointers for refining your ideas:

1. Analyse your broader topics to see what are the more relevant, immediate and/or interesting issues that arise out of it. Once you hit on one that probably is relevant to your audience, immediate AND interesting, you've probably got a good story idea.
2. Use the mapping technique (see graphic) to help you think through a broader topic. You'll think of sources to speak to, who may give you insights into the real story on the event/in the industry. You may also hit upon an unexplored side issue you can focus on.
   
3. Summary sentences need to make sense on their own. You shouldn't have to explain what the summary sentence means.
4. Start getting specific about your sources; you need job titles, names, descriptions of the kind of experiences the source should have.
5. Keep asking yourself questions: it's the only way you will get better at analysing and thinking through an idea.