The goal of good lead writing is to tell people two basic things:

1. What happened?
2. Why do I, as the reader, care about this?

While many leads fail to do one or both of these when they don’t include enough information, some leads do almost the same thing when they give the readers too much stuff all at once.

Here’s one about the death of a former NBA player who became an incredible businessman:

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA sixth man who rose from modest means to forge one of the most successful post-playing business careers of any professional athlete, becoming a billionaire philanthropist and, recently, a minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks team for which he once played, died Tuesday after suffering a medical emergency during an event in Louisville, Kentucky.

This 58-word monstrosity gives me way too much information and I find myself struggling to keep up with everything the writer is trying to say. The writer decides not to make any choices about what to keep in the lead and what to relegate to lower paragraphs, thus making this a difficult read.

Let’s take a look at how you can avoid this kind of problem when you have a lot of things happening and they might all seem lead-worthy.

First, let’s lay out all of the facts in the “One Piece at a Time” approach to this lead:

• Junior Bridgeman died Tuesday.
• He suffered a medical emergency while at an event in Louisville.
• He was an NBA player.
• He won the Sixth Man of the Year award.
• He was born of modest means.
• He had a successful post-player business empire.
• He became a billionaire.
• He was a philanthropist.
• He was a minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks. (meaning he wasn’t the main owner, for folks who are unfamiliar with concept)

That’s a heck of a lot of stuff, even when you consider that it doesn’t include at least one thing most obituary-style stories like this tend to have (age of the deceased). That means we need to make decisions.

Second, start off with the most direct Noun-Verb-Object kind of approach we can take here to what matters most:

Junior Bridgeman died after a medical emergency.

We have a good noun, a solid verb and a solid prepositional phrase with a crucial object of the preposition that tells us how he died (at least somewhat).

 

Third, start looking for ways that you can condense some of the statements above, removing redundant elements or reshaping them in a more direct way.

For example, we basically say he was rich three ways:

• Successful business empire
• Billionaire
• Team owner

Maybe there’s a way to either eliminate one of those or to recraft the sentence to shrink up what is there to tighten the sentence:

Junior Bridgeman, a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, died after a medical emergency.

We also say he was an NBA player in two ways:

• Former Sixth Man of the Year
• He played for the Bucks

We could rework that to both of those things into this as well with some tightening and structuring:

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA Sixth Man of the Year  who became a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks after his playing days ended, died after a medical emergency.

I’m at 32 words here, so if I’m going to add anything else, I’m probably going to need to make some changes. Let’s see what we add and what we cut:

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA Sixth Man of the Year  who became a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks after his playing days ended, died Tuesday in Louisville, Kentucky, after a medical emergency.

If we add the where and the when, we’re at 36. We could go one of two ways to make a cut here. We could remove the phrase “after his playing days ended” if we think it’s obvious that he didn’t become those things before or during his playing days. We could also cut the award and replace it with “player,” which would swap five words for one. We could do both if we wanted to find a way to weave his age in.

Junior Bridgeman, a former NBA player who later became a billionaire philanthropist and minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, died Tuesday at 71 after a medical emergency in Louisville, Kentucky.

This gets us to 30 words, adds in the age and allows for development later. We could swap out the age and put back the Sixth Man of the Year award, if we felt it was more valuable to the audience than his age. I’m also not a huge fan of three prepositional phrases in a row, as that starts to make this a little sing-songy. It’s a judgment call at this point. Either way, we basically have a congruent amount of information to the original lead in half the space.

The one thing to remember about lead writing is that there’s nothing wrong with pour out all the info you have into a sentence, but you then have to go back and make decisions. In most cases, the writing of the lead is in the editing, so make sure to give your lead those additional looks that can make the difference between one that’s tight and right and one that’s bloated and confusing.

EXERCISE TIME: Find a lead in a publication that you read that goes way over that 35-word limit. (The longer the better) and use this approach to get it under control. If you need to use other elements from the story to do so, feel free to dig into the body of the piece a little bit.

Then, see what other people think about your changes and be able to justify your actions as you go along.