Get the Lead Out

One of the dumb things about the New Yorker’s website is that it is virtually impossible to find recently outdated articles. You can actually guess, by looking at the naming conventions, and discover that most of the content they have published on the site remains anchored in placid waters to a permanent URL. But the site search engine does not index this material, and they have apparently put up the barricades to the Google spiders as well. (The happy consequence of this, as we’ve mentioned many times before, is that a publication like the New Yorker or the New York Times simply cannot prevent most of its content from migrating out onto the greater web. If you know what you’re looking for, you will eventually find it, because someone will have posted it.)

One of the nice things about the New Yorker’s website is their little archive feature that brings back some of the magazine’s greatest hits. As our pal TMFTML points out, this classic Calvin Trillin piece is presently screening. It is a fine, recursive piece that in the lead describes the colorful leads of two Miami Herald crime reporters. We won’t reiterate that stuff here, you can read it for yourself. But we thought we’d riff a little bit on this whole topic of story leads.

Story leads tend to be the kind of thing that editors get really excited about. There’s a sort of pointless culture of “the perfect lead” that probably contributes to hundreds of thousands of cases of debilitating writer’s block every year. True enough, you eventually have to start your story somewhere. But in terms of actually getting the thing going, you know, one foot in front of the other, qwerty-style, we prefer to just jump in wherever it feels most compelling or interesting to do it. You can worry about the perfect lead at about the same time you’re worrying about the perfect kicker–after you’ve said the bulk of what it was you were itching to say. (If you weren’t itching to say something, you should check your records and see where the assignment came from.)

When it comes to leads, the main commandment that we try to observe is to avoid anything that smells funny, that doesn’t fit, that overpromises what the reader might be getting into, that in retrospect is too self-aware of being a lead. (This is true of conclusions, too. Overarching summaries and loud pronouncements about what the foregoing all means have a sort of belittling effect on the readers, we fear, as if they weren’t smart enough to reach the same conclusions the writer has spent several thousand words trying to lead them to.) A good lead should not stand out like a big red nose on an otherwise unpainted face. Though it’s undoubtedly sacrilege to say it, we think some of Edna Buchanan’s leads were clownish in this way.

Our friend Beth, who has had many wonderful little editor-style observations in recent bloggish posts, pointed out a few weeks ago the real violence that has been done to the standard newspaper lead in recent years… you know, the devolving, inductive, anecdotal quip that is normally a newspaper’s version of, “Once upon a time, in a land far away…” We think our local daily paper has generally improved in its news sections when it comes to just getting to the point, rather than making a desperate play for our heartstrings within the first fifty words. The columnists, though… We enjoy watching a pro like Beth take ’em apart.