You can waltz in like Ozzie ...

... or you can waltz in like Harriet, but you can't waltz in like Ozzie and Harriet. That's more or less the problem with the Freep lede here: You can explode over the riverfront, or in the skies, but exploding over the skies is going to be a challenge in space-time.

Nor am I blown away by the choice of illustration for the day's Brexit coverage:

Apparently, photos of the Elizabeth Tower reflected in puddles are already A Thing. I'm not sure if it's the complete irrelevance of "Big Ben is reflected in a puddle in London on Monday as Britain, in line with Thursday's vote, began preparations to leave the European Union" or the overall Magritte-meets-Terry Gilliam vibe, but I'm unmoved. And turning the paper upside down doesn't help.

Forbidden and unforbidden

I suppose someone took the summer off before returning to the preferred lede for matters coming out of Lansing:

LANSING — Flamethrowers and sky lanterns and drones, OH MY!

So it's a mere four months since:

LANSING — Bed bugs and lady bugs and lice, oh my!

LANSING – Cookies and brownies and Rice Krispies treats, oh my!

All this in addition to an entirely unrelated feature hed that showed up last week:

All of which should call forth the usual questions about whether anybody downtown even bothers to read the stuff before hitting the button anymore. But then comes a phenomenon to which I wish to draw your attention. Here are the main-clause verbs from all the display photo captions in Sunday's "The Blitz," a weekly (at this time of year) section comprising eight open pages devoted to Michigan and Michigan State football*:

Michigan State's Aaron Burbridge, left, catches a pass for a touchdown

Michigan State's Riley Bullough (30) was called for targeting 

Michigan State's Madre London is tackled by Air Force's Kaleel Gaines

Michigan State's Aaron Burbridge is tackled by Air Force's Jesse Washington

Ohio State cornerback Eli Apple runs the ball after an interception

Notre Dame running back C.J. Prosise makes a diving touchdown run against Georgia Tech

Arbor Brewing Company owner Matt Greff, left, toasts Joey Stinson of Eastern Michigan University athletics and Brian McShane, bar manager with Arbor Brewing Company

Jamar Williams, left, and Mike Figgs with EMU athletics pour Arbor Brewing Company beers

Michigan's Ty Issac rushed for 114 yards on eight carries

Michigan's Grant Perry dives into the end zone trying to make a touchdown reception 

Michigan quarterback Jake Rudock scrambles out of the pocket 

Michigan's Ty Issac scampers 76 yards for the Wolverines' third touchdown

U-M's Channing Stribling (8) and Ben Gedeon (42) tackle UNLV wide receive Devonte Boyd

U-M quarterback Jake Rudock threw for only 123 yards against UNLV

By no means is all right with the world. You might wonder, for example, who's right -- the competition, the official-looking fan site or the paper itself -- on the spelling of Ty Isaac/Issac's family name.** Or why there are so many passive verbs explaining what happened to Michigan State players, rather than telling you whether something of interest might have happened during the play. But you do see occasional flashes of competent editing: using the caption to talk about how well a player did overall or what happened on a specific play. Even more important is what you don't see: No one "celebrates" anything.

I'm not sure exactly what it means. It might just mean that this section -- for whatever episodic or systematic reason -- simply didn't carry any photos of athletes celebrating. (Or that photographers have remembered to wake up before the play is over.) Or it might mean that parts of the remnant Freep desk are trying to use cutline space to complement visual journalism: to tell you why you're seeing something, rather than telling you what you're seeing. And it could entirely be an accident. For whatever reason, it's sort of a benchmark. Other papers should strive to have celebrate-free sections.
 
* Yes, the Carnegie Research 1 school a few miles from where this paper is published occasionally rates a line or two. Covering it regularly might involve doing journalism, which is a challenge when it doesn't have the sort of public status that the other research schools within H-bomb radius can command.
** Or whether there are circumstances under which white guys "scamper," but that's the price of teaching the introductory doc studies seminar this year.

Today in "that's what"

What, no whiskers on kittens?

DEER PARK, Ohio – Ebola, evil voices and the devil.

Those are just a few of the things a Butler County bartender cited as reasons he was going to kill House Speaker John Boehner this past fall, federal agents said.

Out saving the world ...

In case you wondered what the Fair 'n' Balanced Network did by way of national coverage between bursts of Kenyan perfidy:

A live-in nanny who refused to leave her employers’ home in California after they fired her left just as mysteriously as she has acted since shortly after the couple her, they said.

Uh, got it.

Lede of the (no longer young) year

My usual instinct on this sort of lede is "quit while you're ahead":

FONTANA, Calif. -- You couldn't re-imagine the climactic IZOD IndyCar Series season finale any more than you could re-imagine the Battle of Iwo Jima without the Marines planting the flag.
 
... but I'm not sure that really applies here. If you quit after "Iwo Jima," so you're just likening an automobile race to, you know, the battle of Iwo Jima, you're not technically ahead. But at least you're not as far behind as when you throw in the Marines and the flag.

Thanks, in the sense of "thanks for the reminder that beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade," to the Arkansas bureau for sharing.

Are you ready to be a copy editor?

Q: How can you tell if you're really a copy editor?
A: If your first reaction to this lede is "wow, somebody finally put commas around a midclause 'police said,'" you are really, truly a copy editor.

Naturally, that's not all you'd notice. You might wonder, for example, about "drug-fueled high" -- "drug-fueled rampage" or "drug-fueled recording session," fine, but let's stay out of the Department of Redundancy Department when we can. You might be puzzled at the second-day nature of the lede. It's really more of a seventh-day lede, in that the events happened last Tuesday, but there's still room to ask: Why is this story in the paper anyway? And you're probably thinking about holding a headline contest after the last edition closes.

But if your takeaway from all this is the heavens don't darken when you punctuate a cops lede correctly, then there's no doubt. You are a copy editor.

Who did what to whom?

OK, syntax and crime-n-cops fans, who murdered whom?

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The first shock came when a leading Lebanese newspaper published a confidential list of 17 witnesses who may testify in the murder trial of a former prime minister — showing their names, passport pictures, dates of birth and where they work.
Read more »

Capacity for what?

Dear Washington Post: What is this "high-capacity ammunition" you speak of in the lede of the top story on Sunday's front?

You can tell me that everybody knows what you meant, and that's possibly true. But diagram it yourself: the modifiers are pointing right at "ammunition," and nothing in the sentence says anything about the thing that holds the ammunition or feeds it into the weapon.

Accuracy is nice for its own sake, of course, and attention to detail on stuff that's familiar is one way of assuring the audience that you're going to be reliable when you get off into uncharted and sometimes anonymous territory (which the story actually does rather well). But there are cases in which it pays to be particularly careful, because anything you do is likely to be held up by the weasels as evidence of your ignorance, fear and "smug moralism." Please don't give the clowns an even break.
 

Forget flood. Interview Mammon.

A senior clergyman resigned Monday over St. Paul Cathedral's handling of anti-capitalist protesters camped outside the iconic church, the second cleric lost in a tense standoff involving God, mammon and their earthly representatives.

Maybe the LAT doesn't mind spending a few extra lines on the overheated prose, given that it's investing 570 words in the story. But when the provincial press chops things down to the 200-plus range, the morality play in the lede should have been the first thing to go.

The broader point is that newspapers should be careful about taking sides. That's true in empirical disputes and even more so in nonempirical ones. We don't get to proclaim who's on the side of the angels and who's a minion of Basement Cat. We don't rule on which scriptures are divinely revealed, and we don't declare that one set of mortals or another is doing God's work. Period.
Read more »

An odd way of looking at things

This AP lede seems to have run more or less untouched at newspapers and websites around the country, so apparently it made sense to somebody, but does anyone else find the phrasing a bit strange?

The decision to pull out fully by January will effectively end more than eight years of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war

Could some of our linguist friends help out here, please? Why do I get the impression that "the Iraq war" was some sort of ongoing concern, like the Big 12, a bar fight or the local food movement, that the U.S. just happened upon and thought it would be interesting to join? Rather than, say, an unprovoked bit of imperial aggression that we've been involved in from the outset because we started it?

I'd hate to think that had just kind of slipped the AP's mind.

Oil, that is

How nice that some writers have temporarily given up the "that's what" lede. Unfortunately, the "that is" lede isn't much of an improvement.

And your point is ... ?

A reader writes to ask, basically (and quite understandably), wtf?

Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco. Sungmin Jang left his name, his culture and his career in South Korea to bet his future on the United States of America, but he's not complaining.
 
The reader's a Philadelphian living in San Francisco, and thus particularly baffled by the reference, but I can share the concern. When a gun comes on stage in the first act, you expect it to go off by the fifth, and when a pop-culture cliche gets you into the lede, you rather expect it to be artfully woven back in by the conclusion.

This one doesn't. There's nothing else in the column to indicate why the particular act of leaving some specific heart in San Francisco, out of all those leavings immortalized in popular song*, was an appropriate setup for this column. Ideally, some kind editor would have reminded the columnist that his lede would have been just as good without the, you know, lede-y parts, and all would have been well.

We get the impression, though, that this columnist doesn't get edited very hard:

For Asians, qualifying for citizenship is especially difficult. In addition to a new language and customs, they must learn a new alphabet.

Yep. No funny-looking alphabets in Europe or Africa!

Most of us -- let's just go ahead and make that "all of us" -- write better when we have someone reading behind us. Not just to catch those pesky typos and the inevitable syntactic flub, but to ask, every now and then: What the hell is that supposed to mean?

* Hard to believe J.D. Crowe was that young, isn't it?

Annals of "that's what": It isn't official

What happens when you negate one of the Great Cliches? Do the skies darken and the rivers run backward if your lede says "Christmas didn't come early" or "it's not official" -- or, in the present case, "Dead! That's what the man wasn't when police found him"? Let's see.

This lede never should have been let out to play, much less (notwithstanding the Sentinel's obsession with promoting every menu change put forth by these chains) found its way to the 1A centerpiece. It confuses a cliche attributed to the walk-in fast-food trade -- "you want fries with that?" -- with the routines of the sit-down trade, and that can't end well. Thus it paints itself into a corner: It takes something that already isn't happening and tells us it won't be happening in the future. The drama can barely be contained.

"Put statements in positive form" is another Strunkenwhite-ism that's easy to deride from the ivory tower but worth keeping in mind for day-to-day writing. It doesn't mean we limit ourselves to writing about puppies, kittens and birthday cake. It means that in many, if not most, cases, your lede is going to get to the point more quickly and be more interesting if it talks about what is, rather than about what isn't.

March of the pronouns

No peeking now -- who did what to whom? And for bonus points, is there a reason you'd be interested?

His job was to protect him from physical harm.

Now, he's potentially shielding him from a $2.5-million lawsuit.

Lucky thing there's a third graf:

Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. has landed in the middle of a civil lawsuit that claims former Detroit Pistons star Allen Iverson instigated a bar brawl that left an Ohio man with a permanent eye injury.

It makes more sense in the online version published the previous day:

Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee has come to the defense of former Detroit Pistons star Allen Iverson in a $2.5-million civil lawsuit involving a bar fight.

Sensible enough that -- you know, you wonder why it wasn't in the newspaper, rather than the pronoun feast we got. I think it's the fear of the first-day lede again. The old media are so obsessed with their oldness that they forget something important: News is supposed to be interesting for its own sake. In a procedural event for which the details a day later are identical to the ones in play at the first flush of publication, you might as well get to the point.

For some readers, after all, it's the first time they've seen the story. For others, don't assume that they need the thing dressed up -- especially when fashion design skills are in short supply.

Thank you, Pope Rupert

Isn't it nice when a reporter goes beyond the "what" to give you the "what next"?

They're going to burn in hell.

Three godless thugs stole a churchgoing Bronx man’s Bible during a vicious beating and robbery captured on chilling surveillance video released by the NYPD yesterday.

Imagine, a newspaper that doesn't just provide coupons; it looks after your immortal soul as well! And not just yours, but souls belonging to those pesky document leakers:

It's whoever leaked the document that bears the burn-in-hell blame.

... and those annoying Democrats:

I pray the president is doing right by this country. But if he is wagging the dog, he will burn in hell.
Read more »

Forbidden ledes: Not your typical

All forms of this lede are permanently barred, under all circumstances:

The masked man who locked a fake bomb to the neck of an Australian millionaire's teenage daughter did not look like your ordinary violent criminal. The gray-haired attacker wielded a baseball bat but wore beige trousers and a light-colored dress shirt, rolled up at the elbows.

Is the AP going to enlighten us on what "your ordinary violent criminal" looks like? I'd be kind of tipped off by the baseball bat and the balaclava, I think, but maybe the gray-haired violent criminals in AP's neck of the woods don't wear light-colored dress shirts before Labor Day or something. I'm trying very hard not to think "did not look like your ordinary violent criminal" is AP-speak for "wasn't black."

AP writers shouldn't leave that impression, of course, but AP editors shouldn't pass it along, either, and AP members can certainly consider calling the control bureau to complain after they spike it themselves. But generally, that's why you avoid proclaiming that anyone is or isn't your typical single mom, college student, crazed Vietnam veteran, party activist or whatever: (a) there is no such thing, and (b) it's a good idea to keep your biases and preconceptions to yourself until you get over them.

Hard to see what makes this pedestrian feature the top news story on the frontpage, even at Lexington, but that's a different rant.

Danglers on the march

Quick, who threw what at whom in this Fair 'n' Balanced lede?
 
Police in riot gear clashed with an unruly crowd Wednesday night outside a Hollywood film premiere on the Electric Daisy Carnival rave, throwing bottles and vandalizing cars and refusing orders to disperse after they were forced to leave an overcrowded theater, authorities said.

I got it, but not immediately. You?

Your love is like a ... wait, what?

Kids, this is why we don't let the National Weather Service write pop songs:

Martha and the Vandellas said love is like a heat wave. The National Weather Service's definition is five days in a row with temperatures of 90 degrees or more.

Love is like a heat wave! No, love is like five 90-degree days!

Detroiters can decide for themselves this week which definition they like better, as Motown is expected to top the temperature charts at 90 degrees or more through next weekend.

Well, there's your problem. We can't tell if we have competing definitions of "love" or of "heat wave." But neither is of much interest if you're trying to take the heat into account for the onrushing work week.

It's true that this is Motown and that Martha Reeves actually did serve on the City Council. Neither of those conditions requires a reach into the Motown catalog for a weather story. When you've painted yourself into a corner, ledewise, stop digging. At least until someone mixes some new metaphors.

And let's be realistic. This is a 250-word weather story. It doesn't have to be all writerly and stuff. It just has to be written.

How not to write ledes

Dogs flew spaceships! The Aztecs invented the vacation! And when it comes to lede writing, everything in your J-textbook is wrong!

The Oakland County Sheriff's Office said Thursday that police and U.S. marshals in St. Paul, Minn., arrested 34-year-old Darius M. McCrary, who is the suspect in the fatal shooting of his ex-girlfriend in front of her children last Thanksgiving.

Here are some mildly heretical suggestions to keep you from producing the same sort of thing:
1) The active voice is overrated
2) Outcome is more important than process
3) All facts are (ideally) true, but not all facts are equal

Notice how much active voice we have to wade through before anything interesting turns up. In the main clause, an office is saying something. Look at the size of the subject noun phrase in the complement clause: "Police and U.S. marshals in St. Paul, Minn." At last, we get to an interesting verb: "arrested." But its magic effects don't last long, because if you aren't keeping up with the daily doings of 34-year-old Darius M. McCrary, you aren't given much reason to read on.

Let's start with some basic assumptions. Sometimes it's more important to know who said something; sometimes it's more important to know what was said.  Most arrests are going to fall into the latter category. That's going to move the local constabulary to the far end of the lede. Second, your choice of verb voice should reflect what you want to emphasize. In most arrests, again, that's unlikely to be the agency doing the arresting. (Exceptions should be obvious: "A newly formed anti-cluelessness unit of the Grammar Police arrested three peevologists Thursday.") Third, your instincts about who qualifies as a "headline name" are probably better than you think. If you're thinking that most nonpublic people should be introduced by residence, occupation, the event that made them prominent, or something similar, rather than by name, you're right. Taken together, that points toward:

A man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend in front of her children on Thanksgiving has been arrested in Minnesota, police said Thursday.

Embrace the passive! Favor outcomes over procedures! You too can preserve all the pathos in barely half the space.

Getting it backward

That's a strange way to begin an argument for putting Alex Avila on the All-Star team, isn't it?

Making an argument for Alex Avila to get a spot on this year's All-Star team is simple: There isn't one. Or there shouldn't be.

The Tigers' 24-year-old catcher enjoys a hefty lead in nearly every offensive category at his position in the American League. In fact, his closest competition is the guy who gives him a day off every once in a while -- Victor Martinez.

One of the advantages of having a full-strength, in-house copydesk is that the editors get used to the writers and their peculiar ways of painting themselves into corners. (Your shop probably had its own versions of Libel Guy and Mangled Cliche Woman.) Here's a lede from last Sunday's sports front to help put today's into context:

Sparky Anderson is widely believed to have said this: "A baseball manager is a necessary evil."

The legendary manager of the Tigers and Cincinnati Reds no doubt believed that when he said it. For his sake, few who watched him do.

What would that last passage look like if you translated it from English to Afrikaans to Serbian and back to English? Let's ask Google:

The legendary manager of the Tigers and Cincinnati Reds no doubt believed that if he did not say. For him, a couple that looked at.

I think I like the new one better. Perhaps Google Translate would be a good coaching technique.

SUNDAY Q&A:
Q: So how bad could it get if Mitch Albom decides to take on Those Pesky Atheists?
A: Very, very bad.