4”: “The lead – like the title – should be a flashlight that shines down into the story.”Ģ000: Christopher Scanlan in “Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21 st Century”: “A good lead beckons and invites.” We’ll get back to what Murray has to say about how to write a good lead, but first, let me take you on a 100-year journey back from the present in reverse chronological order to demonstrate the preference for “lead,” even back in the era of molten lead.Ģ017: John McPhee in “Draft No. In other words, the intentional misspelling of both NEW and LEAD – to NU LEDE – served as a kind of alert for news or wire editors working on multiple editions of the newspaper. We still used the spelling “l-e-d-e” for the word lead so it would stand out on the telegraphic printout – “NU LEDE” – to signal a new top for the stories that were almost always written in the inverted pyramid style, with the latest and most important information first … (He won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.) In his 2000 book “ Writing to Deadline,” Murray offers a different origin story: Ironically, the only journalism text in which I found the spelling lede was written by a mentor, Donald Murray, who wrote for the Boston Herald in the 1950s. So was this lino-tripe, or something else? His conclusion was that there was “no historic basis for the spelling of a lead as ‘lede.’ ‘Lede’ is an invention of linotype romanticists, not something used in newsrooms of the linotype era.” Sitting as I am near a library of about 12,000 journalism books, I decided to re-create Owens’s research - maybe kick it up a notch if I could. He set out to answer the same question: Is it lede or lead? As a collector of old journalism books, he discovered that even in the era of hot type, the spelling lead was preferred by writers, editors and journalism teachers. My editor, Barbara Allen, sent me on a scavenger hunt of sorts, but not before sharing a link to a 2011 essay written by Howard Owens. (So did hed serve to avoid confusion with “head” when writing about the price of lettuce?) I was told early on that lede avoided confusion with the molten lead that dominated print technology in decades past.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |