To be blunt, I honestly don't get them. They are the same as an opening paragraph to an essay... but WAIT. No, they aren't. They're leads. But they still introduce the reader what is going to be talked about. So, in a basic sense, they are the same.
Anyway, I'm not a fan of leads. And they're not a fan of me. I feel like leads have to be extremely precise in order to properly hone in on a particular subject. I'm not good at summarizing things in thirty words or less; I like to be verbose and explain rather than dramatize and have the reader jump to conclusions.
But, whatever. Leads are imperative to journalism. I just like to complain about it.
Here are some links to stories that I found with interesting leads:
This TNH article has a basic, inverted-pyramid lead
This Union Leader article may be a blind lead
And this Huffington Post article may be a delayed lead
The effectiveness of each lead is unique to each story. For instance, since no story is alike, and no writer writes the same, all leads are written to make each story sound better; a hard story has a basic, inverted lead, while a soft story may have an anecdotal lead.
As an addendum to this blog post, one should note that searching for online news stories for free on the Internet can get somewhat annoying, since they barely exist.
No comments:
Post a Comment