Forbidden ledes

For all you junior league players out there,* here's a diagnostic test. When removing the lede paragraph from a story produces utterly no effect whatsofreakingever on the subsequent content, you have a lede you should kill. As in:

Call it good news that could be a whole lot better.

Cancer incidence decreased about 1 percent a year from 1999 to 2006, and deaths dropped an average of 1.6 percent a year from 2001 to 2006, according to a report released by the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries.

"Call it" is your first hint. It's on the master list of Forbidden Ledes, which should have been freshly etched on your forehead with a soldering iron this month, owing to the high likelihood of Christmas coming early and grinches doing stuff to unlocked cars and all that. But more to the point: Place your thumb over the first graf. Read the second graf. Now go back and read the first graf.** Might as well throw the poor thing out, gratuitous reporterly judgment and all.

You shouldn't kill ledes at random, true. Editors look out for writers' interests as zealously as they look out for readers' interests. But both those parties are served best when the Great Cliches are quietly left to die on the floor of the composing room. Really.

* Sorry, too much Don Cherry in the media diet of late up here.
** If you're a Fox reader, remember to raise that thumb first!***
*** That wasn't very nice, was it? Won't happen again.

Forbidden ledes and other delights

Would somebody like to explain the reasoning on this one?

It's official: Charlotte is now the center of the NASCAR universe.

Did we think that somehow all the Evil Lede gunk would be magically washed off? Or that because this was clearly the Most Super-Enormous Important Sports Story since, oh, 2003 or so, the readers really, really needed the "It's official"? Or is there a secret project under way to try cliche ledes on every story in the paper?

It's official: Gov. Mike Rounds signed legislation Monday banning nearly all abortions in South Dakota!

It's official: Republicans in Congress are trying to limit the scope of any investigation into how President Bush's secret domestic-surveillance program has operated!

It's official: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that the government can force colleges to open their campuses to military recruiters!

No, no, no. Forbidden ledes are barred under all circumstances. How many editors failed in their duty to stop this lede before it hit the dead pine trees?


Meanwhile, debate rages over this entry:

No sweat: S.C. was actually a little cool last year
Good morning. Today's Lowcountry forecast is for another gasping hot one. The high will be 110 degrees. The heat index will be 130, a little cooler on the beaches. Records for today are ...

Last year was one of the hottest on record worldwide, researchers say, a finding that has touched off another round of are-we or aren't-we global-warming debate. But in South Carolina, it was one of the cooler years on record.

Don't bother to shiver. The average 2005 temperature ranked 70th out of 110 years on record, but the temperature was 64.35 degrees Fahrenheit - a smidgen above normal. And researchers say that relative coolness actually could have been caused by warming in the world's oceans.

The National Aeronautic and Atmospheric Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies says the temperature rose 1.4 degrees worldwide in the 20th century, 1 degree of that since 1970.

Meanwhile, long range climate forecast models suggest the more SPF in the sunscreen the better. The two leading models disagree only on whether temperatures or heat index will climb higher.

Interestingly enough, while there was a cooling trend in the state inland in the past century, there was a warming trend - as much as 4 degrees- along the coast.

"We recognize there's a cooling trend, but is it a significant trend? No," said Hope Mizzell, state climatologist.

It kind of goes on and on and on from here. If anybody can figure out where exactly it's going, or what it's doing in the newspaper, pls advise.

Forbidden ledes

Looks like this one is spreading among the crime reporters downtown.

Remember, kids: Only you can prevent Forbidden Ledes. 

Open mike for interns, 2008 edition

A note in yesterday's comments section spotlights one of the great dilemmas of this odd little craft we call editing, so it's time to bring an old tradition* out of mothballs. A few quick comments, and then -- I hope -- it's over to the interns.

Here's the comment from Luke**: "It's a struggle finding where what you've been taught was ideal in J-school applies and when exceptions are OK." He's quite right, and it may not be much consolation to know that the boundary can remain fluid long after the J-school and internship stage. But the matter does touch on a lot of issues that keep on coming up here, and interns are often in an especially ill-defined position when it comes to negotiating those issues.

There's the problem, for starters, of exactly how grammatical you want to get. One of the fun secrets of the newsroom is that the people who talk the loudest about "the language" often don't know very much about it (if you frequent the peevology section, you might have noticed that journalists -- and, to be fair, J-profs -- aren't alone in this regard). If someone tells you to stop sending over passive heds, you might need a decoder ring to know whether "passive" means "passive" or just "boring."

In many ways, you and your slot editor are navigating by throwing rocks in the dark and waiting to hear if any glass breaks. You're trying to figure out what the slot means by "grammar" and "rules," and the slot's wondering whether you let a split auxiliary go through because you exercised solid professional judgment or because you've never heard of the one "rule" the publisher remembers from college. Who's going to ask first? That's tricky even in a relationship where power is about even.

(The faculty*** is in a bit of a bind too. There's a lot of stuff in the secret-handshake category that really shouldn't be taught anymore -- certainly not as "grammar." But practically, we can't stop teaching the "over/more than" thing until editors stop testing for it. I expect lots of people on both sides will be happy to attend the opening ceremony of the disarmament talks, but until then, it'd be a brave journalism school that decided to teach the AP Stylebook as an important cultural artifact with nothing whatsoever worth reading about grammar and usage.)

Figuring out the grammar part is only the beginning. At some point in any good journalism program, students are introduced to the Forbidden Ledes: "It's official," "Christmas came early for ..." and all the other ones that should never stain a dead pine tree. The list tends to leave out a mundane but highly pertinent observation. Writers use the Forbidden Ledes. A lot. What's going to happen the first time you kill a "Christmas came early" on the local front centerpiece?

Did somebody say all journalism students ought to take at least one stats course? Well, they should. Does that mean someone's going to listen when you suggest that Star Reporter's keen political analysis of the latest poll is entirely unsupported by the data? You may be right, but don't expect to win.

So with that cheery screed aside, I hope this summer's journalism interns will take a moment to offer some advice. Two specific questions are posed:

1) What's the biggest surprise of your summer in journalism?
2) What's the one thing we should have taught you and didn't?

If you're an intern, please hit the button and comment. If you work in a shop with some interns, let 'em know they're invited. If you have some comments from your recent experience on either side**** of the divide, you can play too.

I hope to hear from you.

* Dating back to the turn of the millennium, when HEADSUP-L was an actual Listserv with a mere few dozen subscribers
** More visitors from KU would be welcome, by the way.
*** A whole bunch of us are going to get together and talk about you guys next week, by the way. Just so's you know.
**** I know. See above about the AP Stylebook.

St. Custard's hav begun another term.

Well, almost. As ane fule kno, the new term doesn't officially start until the crack of eight on Monday. So there's still time to shake out a few kinks and aim for a semester entirely free of Forbidden Ledes and other undelights.

Boone County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a call from a resident about a man carrying a “big gun” north of Columbia on Friday night.

"Police responded to..." and all its variants are permanently banned, from all ledes, at all times, under all circumstances. The news is the arrest, not the happy circumstance of the cops' doing their job.

Localman, who the Sheriff’s Department said was intoxicated, had apparently angrily threatened three residents of a nearby housing unit with the rifle.

We have no idea what this chap "apparently" did. If we know what the POLICE SAY he did, put that in the story and attribute it. But no speculating about what "apparently" happened.

Localman is being held at the Boone County Jail. His arraignment is scheduled for Monday.

No peering into the future, which is what "is being held" does. We have no idea whether that will be true at the time of publication. Stick with what you know: "Was being held Saturday at the Boone County Jail."

On the bright side: The story follows house style, rather than Tribune style, on "Sheriff's Department" and "Missouri 763." And it's still the preseason.

On July 28, Christian music artist Caleb Rowden signed a guitar for a young fan of his music

This one's a bit trickier. Date ledes aren't banned outright, but they ought to be extremely rare because they only work in a limited number of cases. They can foreshadow:

On Sept. 10, 2001, Roscoe completed his plans for a New York vacation. He bought Yankees tickets. He made reservations at the restaurant atop the World Trade Center for that Saturday night.

And they can set up a contrast or introduce a relevant date:

On Aug. 21, 1976, Roscoe kissed his family goodbye and left for work as usual. Thirty years later, his disappearance remains a mystery.

But for kicking off a garden-variety news or anecdotal lede, they almost invariably take the reader's eye off the ball by emphasizing the wrong thing. This one isn't about the date as much as the event: "a CD signing in Columbia between gigs in Michigan and Ohio." Desk hands don't want to hack these apart on their own, but they should feel free to suggest improvements. ("Police responded," on the other hand, must be changed in all cases, though it's a good idea to notify the offending desk.)

Lucky Newcomer, a Taiwanese graduate student studying public affairs, had the winning number — 7448 — and was the lucky recipient of a new microwave.

Adjectives aren't always bad things; as the Language Logsters point out, E.B. White is a better writer when he ignores his own anti-adjective commandments. But "lucky winner," like "scrumptious sandwich," is the sort of adjectival overload that comes from watching too many commercials. We've said he had the winning number; what's the point of adding that he's "lucky?"

Unfortunately, heavy rains washed out the game.

Again, not so much wrong as irrelevant, though for a different reason. The paper's judgment on whether this occurrence is fortunate or unfortunate is of no import whatever, and writer and editors should resist the temptation to share it. (The flip side is the classic Anchorman Adverb: "Fortunately, no one was hurt." The victims' good fortune doesn't need the anchorman's blessing.)

Now for some good news, because there's a lot of it in the overnights: Story/cutline age discrepancy, fixed. Misspelled name in story, fixed. Misspelled names -- yes, that means rather a few of them -- in obits, fixed. Misstated relationship in obit, fixed. And the potentially embarrassing "closet friend" turned into "closest friend." That presages a good season of desk work. Writers owe these folks a round of applause (and, for those 21 and over, drinks).

Forbidden ledes

Ledes of the form Dead That's What* are forbidden under all circumstances anyway. Their evil nature is underscored when a pronoun like "me" is left flapping the breeze with nothing but the byline to refer back to.

I suspect that the motive, once again, is the morbid fear of writing a first-cycle lede in an always-on world. That's generally overblown as it is; readers aren't nearly as attentive to news as such an assumption would require. And when the cure is worse than the imaginary disease, we might as well be leeching to cure a case of witch-possession. Stop it.

* From Thurber's "Dead. That's what the man was when they found him."

Forbidden ledes: Experts edition

Those who look back fondly on Judith Miller's nuanced, incisive yet evenhanded Near East reporting will be happy to know they can catch up over at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

Not since the Sermon on the Mount has a speech in the Middle East been so anticipated.

"Not since" ledes (fellow toilers in the Knight-Ridder vineyards might recognize them as Fruit of the Washburo) are the tool of a particular kind of weak writer: the one who can't be bothered to do the footwork but wants to get by on the sheer sonority of the proclamation. So let's avoid getting bogged down in whether Matthew or Luke has the better sense of the crowd that may or may not have been gathering for the Sermon on the Mount; let's talk about those intervening two millennia. Has anything happened over in the Fractious Near East that we ought to take notice of?

To be a perfectly annoying copy editor about it all, it only takes one speech to knock a hole in the lede, so -- how about Sadat's address to the Knesset? Yeah, that might do. Or, at least, it might suggest that experts who want to enlighten us about That Part of the World should start with the assumption that Those People know their neighborhood pretty well. We already know what Judith Miller thinks, and it doesn't seem to have helped. Imagine if journalism turned its attention toward people who actually had some vague clue about how the assorted regional actors might see their interests and goals.

On ledes and banning them

A certain beloved lede has been a regular visitor down at the Kwame Kilpatrick trial:

Unlikable and criminal.

That's how the government has cast over the last three months what it calls the Kilpatrick Enterprise, firing off story after story about alleged extortion and rigged contracts, misused charity funds, hidden cash and lavish lifestyles bankrolled by wealthy businessmen. (Jan. 2)

===== 

First, ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick crashed his Christmas party. Then, Kilpatrick never sent him a thank-you note for paying off his nearly $5,000 layaway bill for some suits.

That's what contractor Johnson Akinwusi told jurors in Kilpatrick's public corruption trial Friday, saying he was shut out of city contracts until he did things to make Kilpatrick happy. (Dec. 15)

=====

Bankrupt or not, Christine Beatty is not off the hook for the nearly $85,000 in restitution she still owes the City of Detroit stemming from the text message scandal involving her former lover, ex-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

That's what the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office says in light of news that Beatty, Kilpatrick's former chief of staff and mistress, has filed for bankruptcy in Georgia. (Dec. 4)

Read more »

Xpesmas lede roundup

Q: Is it still a Forbidden Lede when the LA Times writes it?
A: Yes. The writers who produced
WASHINGTON — Christmas arrived Wednesday for the kidney dialysis industry.
... will face eternal torment, as will the editors who approved it.

Q: Well, how about if it's in the feature section?
A: Yes. Abandon all hope, ye who could have stopped
'Tis the season to be jolly, right?

Q: But if there's another Xpesmas cliche in the hed, that cancels everything out, right?
A: No. That is an arithmetic fallacy. Twice damned are those who added
O COME ALL YE THIRSTY
Seasonal brews could make even Scrooge smile

To repeat: No Scrooges. No Grinches. Didn't no nothing come early. 'Tisn't no season for no part of nothing. There are not enough negatives nowhere to indicate how eternally banned the Forbidden Ledes are.

Speak for yourself

Q: Why do mean-spirited old editors insist on crushing the souls of the vibrant young spirits who write for the modern press?
A: Because they can!

No, not really. It's because no matter how often the message is shared, somebody has always just stepped out for coffee. Christmas is going to be right on time this year, no matter how tempted you are to say otherwise. And no, we do not scream for ice cream.

I don't know if there's a correlation between the frequency of Forbidden Ledes and the rise of editing hubs, but it's worth looking at. Maybe the howls of pain and gales of derisive laughter from within your own newsroom were enough to break youngsters of these habits.

Perhaps one of our technologically advanced friends could come up with an alternative solution? An app that throws a dictionary across the room toward the workstation at which a "there's an app for that" lede has been entered?

Forbidden ledes: AP haz dem

WASHINGTON — Paddlings, swats, licks. A quarter of a million schoolchildren got them in 2007.

File the laundry-list lede with It's Official, Christmas Came Early, and any and all recipes. Don't let this one into your newspaper, and if your shovelware has already posted it -- why, yes, you can has another!

How the other half lives

You might indeed have awakened on some planet with twelve ammonia-fueled suns, whereon the feckless Kenyan's handshake with the murderous dictator of Cuba was dwarfed only by the "international incident" he and his friends created with somebody's iPhone:

Call it the selfie seen 'round the world.

No, don't. Has no one at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network even heard of the list of Forbidden Ledes?

Among the enduring images from Nelson Mandela's massive memorial service in Johannesburg Tuesday will be one of a jovial President Obama taking a cell phone pic with his seat-mates, Denmark's Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Britain's David Cameron.

As the three of them smile for the camera, a stern-looking Michelle Obama can be seen staring straight ahead, hands clasped. As if to remind anyone who sees this photo years from now that it was, after all, a memorial service for one of the great human rights leaders.

More about that in a minute, because we're skating up to the point at which the goofy theoretical stuff actually starts to explain the practical stuff fairly well. But first, this:

The tsk-tsk-ing could be heard across continents.
Read more »

Forbidden ledes: Thumb test

Today's tip: When you're tempted to begin your story with one of the Great Cliches,  stop for a moment and put your thumb over the cliche. If the ensuing text makes just as much sense as it did before, go ahead and delete your precious lede. (Yes, even if it's just a brief.) Your readers will be none the wiser, but if they were, they'd thank you.

Forbidden ledes

When you can delete your lede without affecting the rest of the story, it is a sign unto you  that you should:

What a difference a debate makes. (Miami Herald)

What a difference a week makes. (Washington Post)

And guess what's back on tap downtown?

A Cadillac DeVille and Nike golf clubs.

That's what jurors in Kwame Kilpatrick's public corruption trial likely will hear about next as the government wraps up its chapter on the Kilpatrick Civic Fund and how prosecutors say the ex-mayor used it as a personal ATM.

The Great Cliches were a burden back in the print days. Why do we think they're going to help us in the age of the Intarwebs?

Forbidden ledes

As a general rule, never start a news story -- or, for that matter, any piece of writing that isn't specifically about you and your choice in stereotypes -- by announcing your choice in stereotypes. For one thing, readers might assume that you're more interested in proclaiming how the world ought to work than in observing how it does. And for another ...

Hair pulled into a ponytail, Nike tennis shoes, jeans.

... people might say, "Hey! That sounds just like the guy I had for high school chemistry in 1970!"

No, don't

Some days they just crop up all over the country:

Call it a tale of two Charlotte churches – one black, one white; one traditional, one not.

Call it fear of filing.

If you didn't get the memo, "Call it" is on the list of permanently forbidden ledes. Shun it.

In that case, why tell me?

If covering the lede with duct tape actually adds to the value of the story beneath, you're probably dealing with one of the Forbidden Ledes. Call for professional help at once.

And while we're at it: If the record was achieved "with the more than 2 inches that fell Saturday," how come the first named source says on Saturday that "we went over the top last night"?

Rule of thumb

Here's the Rule of Thumb for ledes: If you can put your thumb over the lede with no effect whatsoever on the story that follows, you can (and probably should) just delete the lede.

Owing to its strange incarnation of the no-jump policy, the Freep's capital buro managed to come up with, in essence, two disposable ledes on the same story* in one day. At top is the 1A version:

This time they stirred the drink -- added a twist -- and it came out just right.

And for 5A, a Forbidden Lede steps in:

What a difference a month makes.

Neither of which does any good if you're interested in finding out what went on (and, despite the newspaper industry's widespread fear of the first-day lede, there's actually a good chance that lots of the readership hasn't heard of the previous day's doings in the statehouse). For that, the second graf of the 1A billboard or the second graf of the featurized version inside would do just fine.

There'd still be plenty of bad writing to go around -- the concluding graf on 1A, for example:
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.

Desk notes (a slight return)

Notes and comments from recent edns. Subscriber-only service will resume sometime soon, honest.

13 WEEKS INTO THE SEASON and we're still allowing ledes like The Boone County Sheriff’s Department and the Southern Boone County Fire Protection District responded to a series of fires late Friday night and early Saturday morning in southern Boone County (5A Monday) into the paper? No, no, no. This is not an option. Destroy all "responded to" ledes on sight. Who knows? With a bit of effort, you might even be able to work the likelihood of the fires' having been set into the first few dozen words.

TEAM IS AN ...: The Missouri basketball team didn’t advance to Madison Square Garden for Wednesday and Friday’s NIT games, but if they had, its highly improbable that they would have traveled by train. (1B Sunday) Cue up the band, maestro: "The Missouri basketball team" is an "it." "The Tigers" are a "they." Ray made the T-shirts so y'all would stop this stuff. Please honor your former sports editors. And, for pity's sake, I-T-APOSTROPHE-S. But pronoun antecedence has pride of place because ...

COME BACK, WILE E. COYOTE: Hearing the crack of one body smashing against another, followed by the whoosh of air that escapes the checked hockey player’s lips as they slowly slide face-first down the boards and onto the slush-covered ice is almost too much for some to bear. (4B Tuesday) OK, grammar fans, what's the only plural noun in this whole awful sentence that "they" could possibly refer back to? Correct. "Lips." Sit back and let the picture form in your mind. On second thought, don't.

FORBIDDEN VERB: Kansas State's Jordy Nelson, left, and Allen Webb celebrate after a touchdown in the fourth quarter sealed a victory for the Wildcats in coach Bill Snyder's last game (9B Sunday). Enough said. No C-word in cutlines, ever. On the bright side, though, we were spared another photo of Carl Edwards' backflip.

MORE CUTLINE FOLLIES: Kashmiri earthquake survivors wait at an evacuee camp in Pakistan on Saturday, as nations pledged $3.4 billion more in aid (8A Sunday). Can the kid in the foreground sit down if the aid gets there in the next week? Better yet, can someone explain why "refugee camp" in the original became "evacuee camp" in the Missourian?

SCHUUUUUULTZ! "We were shocked," the German official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven" (8A Sunday). Uh, right. LATimes creditline or no LATimes creditline, one is entitled to one's armchair doubts about whether the BND-nik in question switched so fast into such classic movie German. The ellipsis is your friend. Use it. (And while we're at it, follow the AP's far more sensible practice and make the ex-secretary of state "Colin Powell," not "Colin L. Powell.")

EXPLAINING TOO MUCH: One or two words is about as large as you want a parenthetical clarification in a quote to get. Beyond that, it starts to look clumsy. Here are two examples from Monday and some ways an editor could tease a better solution out of the writer:

“(The Navy’s culinary specialists) have the experience of feeding 3,000,” said Dan Meyer, one of the MU team. Try tweaking the graf to work in the antecedent; an indirect quote about Navy cooks leads naturally into "They have the experience of feeding 3,000."

“(The parade is about) holiday spirit, being a community, and love, peace and joy,” she said. You can also set up the quote with a question of your own: What does the parade mean to Easton? "Holiday spirit, being a community ..."

If all else fails, fall back on the partial quote. Better that than a full quote that's as much the writer's as the source's.

Thoughts, complaints, huzzahs? Back to hauling up the data on the Xerox line.