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The very first sentence of a news story is called a lead.

It leads the rest of the information.

So your lead is the most important sentence of the whole story.

And that's because the lead must attract and hold a reader's attention or

else they won't read the rest.

In a prior module where we talked about news elements,

we discussed that there are so many issues and events that happen in a community,

how do you decide which ones to report to your audiences?

In this module, we talk about leads, but even as you choose an issue or

as you choose an event, there's so much happening within that one issue or event.

It's hard to find what would be the most important point that

your audiences would want to know about.

It's hard sometimes to find the central point, and

some events have several points, and each point perhaps would be a different story.

Leads take time to develop, and you need to consider your audience.

You also need to consider the news elements that were discussed in

a prior module.

As you think about your audience, consider why should they care about this event or

this issue and how will this event or this issue affect them.

There are many different types of leads.

The lead for a story depends on the news style for that medium.

So a lead might be written differently for radio than it is for TV than it is for

a magazine than it is for digital than it is for a newspaper or print.

And also, the news lead might change depending upon the type of story

whether it's a hard news story or whether it's soft news, such as a feature or

human interest.

Alternatively, this can be narrative, suspenseful, descriptive, unusual.

And the lead depends upon how appropriate it might be for the story, and for

the audience.

You will see different examples of different story leads

throughout this course.

The most common lead, however, is called a summary lead.

A summery lead means that with all these things that happened at this event,

you are able to get to the point of what happened and

why your audiences should care.

Audiences will understand the essence of the story just by reading the lead.

The rest of the story is information that justifies or supports that lead.

Audiences can understand the essence of a news story merely by reading the lead.

So the rest of the story is information that gives detail to the lead and

helps support the lead.

The body of a news story is an inverted pyramid.

So that means that the most important information comes first,

the second most important comes second, third most important is third, and

as one goes down, it becomes more detailed.

If a story has to be chopped in half,

then the most important information still was revealed in the lead.

The summary lead, as we noted, is the most common lead.

There are certain elements to that summary lead.

The who, what, where, when, why, and how.

So how do we put together a summary lead?

Imagine you are covering the Olympics and your country just won the gold in soccer.

How would you write a summary lead about that?

Well, you can list out the who, what, where, when, why,

and how, and just answer those.

Who, The U.S. women's soccer team.

What, Won the gold medal.

Where, At the Olympics.

When, Yesterday.

Why, They had a 2-1 win over Japan.

How, because a teammate named Lloyd scored the winning goal.

So if you string all those elements together, you have your summary lead.

The US women's soccer team won the gold medal at the Olympics yesterday,

in a 2-1 win over Japan when Lloyd scored the winning goal.

You have a summary lead if you string the parts together into a sentence.

You might want to add more information, such as the the Olympics

was in the United Kingdom, how many fans that were watching this happen, and

you may also want to change the order of some of the elements.

But the point is is that you are able to answer these questions

all in one sentence, and an audience member knows what happened.

The how or why sometimes is not known when a story is written.

Such as, why an accident happened, or how someone was killed.

Those would go in a follow up story.

If you'd like to practice how to write a summary lead,

consider the different events or issues that are happening around you.

And write out the who, what, where, when, why and how and answer those.

And then you'll be able to string them together and put them into a summary lead.

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Developing leads

Capstone: Create your own professional journalistic portfolio

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