Fun ledes

We have a full-time stringer who also freelances for a major national magazine, who lives locally and likes to cover the crime beat (and write crime books, which he's done with nice success). Anyway, sometimes he writes really good like one for this week:

DATELINE — An Ascutney man who, according to a witness,
fired three shots at his fleeing wife Saturday,
"like he was after a deer with a rifle,"
was ordered held without bail Monday
because he now faces a potential life sentence in prison.


The "like he was after a deer with a rifle" quote is priceless. I totally envision how that must have looked when it happened.

What are some of your favorite ledes?

 

CHICAGO (AP) - It was like old times for Cub fans today. Steve Trachsel pitched slowly and the Cubs lost at Wrigley Field.

 

Dude must not be much of a hunter. I assume from the lede that he didn't hit his wife.

 

I wrote one some years back when two of our state college teams played. They were a combined 3-20 or something like that that season. It started raining 10 minutes before kickoff, stopped 10 minutes before the game ended, and led to an appropriately miserable 12-3 game. My lede...

"The football gods wept on the Delta Saturday afternoon."

 

No offense, but that guy's lede is kind of clunky. I've taken the liberty of cleaning it up:

Police say an Ascutney man Saturday fired three shots at his fleeing wife "like he was after a deer with a rifle," as one witness put it.

 

the problem here is, while I doubt too many people confuse this, the statement suggests the witness is witnessing the police saying that...not necessarily the act of what the man did.

 

True. But I'm working from the original, so I don't know if the witness made that statement to police, in which case I would knock out the "Police say" and have at the end "as one witness told police." I'm trying to get around using "allegedly" but putting in the requisite qualifier to presume innocence.

Anyway, my reason for revision was the original lede had too much information stuffed into it. The bond and the potential prison sentence don't have to go in the lede. Actually, I would say that's a common problem with ledes -- too much information stuffed into one graf.

 

Delta Saturday is the name of the field?



















Oh....Delta on Saturday afternoon.

 

Thank you. Pet peeve of mine but I didn't want to point it out.

 

It's not a pet peeve. It's wrong.

 

Texas Rangers manager Whitey Herzog offered a cinematic parallel to last night's 14-2 loss to California at Arlington Stadium.
"It was like the love scene from Deliverance," Herzog said.

 

:-X :-X