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Best ledes

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Songbird, Nov 9, 2019.

  1. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    This isn't the lede, just part of the story.

    With that, what ARE your favorite ledes?

    Who writes the best ledes these days?


     
  2. tapintoamerica

    tapintoamerica Well-Known Member

    Edna Buchanan on the guy shot while trying to stick up a chicken place in protest of its slow service: “(Name) died hungry.”

    Don’t know author. Story about a condemned man’s final hours: “(Name) received a phone call from his girlfriend that warmed his heart and 10,000 volts of electricity that stopped it.”
     
  3. Slacker

    Slacker Well-Known Member

    If Edna had written that lede ...
     
  4. Vombatus

    Vombatus Well-Known Member

    Technical point: Voltage isn’t what kills - it’s the resulting current flow.

    I know of stories where people have been killed and the potential difference was less than five volts.

    Current is what disrupts the heartbeat.
     
  5. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member


    Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.



    John Lardner
    True Magazine
    1954
     
    HanSenSE and Double Down like this.
  6. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    Wow 3 "was" in the sentence.

    And they say to avoid being passive.
     
    SFIND likes this.
  7. Dog8Cats

    Dog8Cats Well-Known Member

    In the game-story category ... Gene Wojciechowski, L.A. Times, 1991:


    TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Chunks of broken ceiling tile and thick swatches of insulation, the products of a Miami victory celebration gone berserk, littered the floor of the visitors’ locker room.

    Kids.

    Meanwhile, in the near-silent Florida State locker room, where the late-great No. 1-ranked Seminoles resided, the damage was more severe. There were broken hearts, broken dreams and the cold realization, as cold as the thought of Saturday’s 17-16 loss to the Hurricanes, that yet another precious national title chance had slipped away.
     
    Neutral Corner and Writer like this.
  8. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    For the longest time, I thought "Gentlemen, start your coffins!" was the lead to a Jim Murray column.

    But it was just a line deep in the column. . . . that also was appropriated for the headline.

    Jim Murray, 'Gentlemen, Start Your Coffins!'
     
  9. ChrisLong

    ChrisLong Well-Known Member

    What's worse, hearing fingernails on a chalkboard or watching Hank Gathers shoot a free throw?
     
  10. Old Crank

    Old Crank Active Member

    This one is usually attributed to the late Frank McGhee of the Daily Mirror. It was his advance on the eve of the 1966 World Cup final between England and (then) West Germany: "If, on the morrow, the Germans beat us at our national game, we'd do well to remember that, twice this century, we have beaten them at theirs."
     
    JimmyHoward33 and HanSenSE like this.
  11. tapintoamerica

    tapintoamerica Well-Known Member

    The light moment actually has a precedent in fact. It reminded anyone who has read Dan Jenkins over the years of his "Best Lead Ever Written on a Golf Story." According to Jenkins, Leonard Crawley of the London Daily Telegraph once typed: "Despite the abominable handling of the press luggage at the Zurich airport, the Swiss Open managed to get of to a rather decent start yesterday."
     
  12. typefitter

    typefitter Well-Known Member

    The entire top of Kathryn Schulz's earthquake story is ridiculously good, but here's the lede:

    When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.

    Yeah, you're gonna keep reading.

    The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest
     
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