How best to write a lead has always been a matter of preference, so long as the key aspects of what matters most get into the first sentence of the news story. When it comes to boiling the lead down to the basics, we tend to lean on our favorite six items: The 5W’s and the 1H. For beginning writers, these elements provide a good set of guidelines for determining what matters most and how to put it into the lead.
The difficult part comes in two specific parts:
- Identifying the key aspects of what matters most in the lead
- Determining the proper order for them.
In most cases, students tend to like to write from front to back, giving themselves a little runway before getting into what matters and why. This is a symptom of years of writing to fill space (“You need to write a 5-page paper that describes…”) instead of learning to write from the core of what matters most.
Here’s a good way of helping students figure out how to build from the core out, by identifying the key elements of a story that can serve as the main part of the lead.
Begin with the idea that the 5W’s and 1H give you some sense of what needs to be in a decent, standard, beginner’s news lead:
- Who
- What
- When
- Where
- Why
- How
Then realize that if you write in the active voice in a direct fashion, you pretty much have the main part covered in noun-verb-object elements:
The key then is to figure out what best to put into those three spots (and, yes I know that that spot is normally for a direct object, not necessarily other objects like the object of a preposition. Sr. Mary Kenneth is long dead but her foreboding figure still haunts me…)
- Packers beat Buccaneers
- Guardians win division
- Mayor vetoes bill
Once you nail that down, you’ve got the remaining 3W’s and 1H to play with and how include them or where you put them is dependent upon what you think matters most to your readers. Think about adding another “layer” to the core, with the more valuable element at the top of the layer and the lesser element at the bottom of the layer:
In this case, I went with “immediacy” leading me to including a “when” sooner rather than later, and I went with “how” because in the cases I selected, it seemed to matter to me as a reader more than the other elements.
See what you think when we add the pieces like this:
- Tom Brady failed to complete a last-minute, two-point conversion, as the Green Bay Packers beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 14-12, Sunday.
- With a Chicago White Sox loss, the Cleveland Guardians clinched the AL Central division Sunday.
- Relying on a little-used law from 1824, Mayor Sam Smith vetoed a bill Sunday that would have given city residents property-tax relief.
In all three cases, there was a pretty intriguing “how” element that added something that readers might want to know, so I put the “How” up front as a clause and kept the core where it was. It’s always possible to layer those “How” and “When” elements elsewhere, but in these cases, it seemed like I could make a case involving value and clarity.
After that, you can layer on the remaining elements as you see fit:
In this case, the “Why” could be a “Why do I care?” for filling in the oddity factor, or a “Why” as in a “Why did this happen?” answering the question like we normally would expect in a lead:
- Tom Brady failed to complete a last-minute, two-point conversion, as the Green Bay Packers beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 14-12, Sunday at Raymond James Stadium…
- WHY 1: giving Aaron Rodgers his second career win against a Brady-led team
- WHY 2: keeping the Packers tied for first in the NFC Central
- WHY 3: dealing the Buccaneers their first loss of the season
- With a Chicago White Sox loss, the Cleveland Guardians clinched the AL Central division Sunday.
- WHY 1: Securing a playoff spot for the youngest team in baseball this year.
- WHY 2: for the 11th time since 1995
- Relying on a little-used law from 1824, Mayor Sam Smith vetoed a bill Sunday that would have given city residents property-tax relief.
- WHY 1: arguing that the city can’t afford the loss in revenue.
- WHY 2: to demonstrate the need to clean up arcane laws on the city’s books.
As noted in the books, not every W and H will make the cut for a lead, nor should they. (You don’t want to ask Terry Francona, “Hey, why did you clinch the division like that?”) That said, this might be a neat way of helping students prioritize their ordering of elements and building leads from a solid foundation that focuses on what matters most.
