I like narrative leads -- but not this one

This is the first I've heard of this story for the reasons above. After reading the first graf, I would have called it a day and known nothing; assuming I didn't see the header, of course.

 

"Pardo, however, was miles away from the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church as the religious service got underway."

Ugh. I tripped over the second sentence of the narrative. It should be "under way." Two words. And hate "got."

 

Instead of "as the religious service got underway," how about, "as the Mass began"? Simpler and a little more graceful. That's symbolic of the entire lede -- the writer needed to make one more pass through it, to tighten it up and maybe get the deaths a little higher.

No problem with a narrative lede in this situation, though. Those who didn't get the nuts and bolts already from TV and the web the night before probably got it from the headline. A straight news lede would have just repeated what most readers already knew, and reminded them that newspapers are less immediate than other sources of news.

 

I'd agree with, I think, the majority here. the time did it well and did it the best way. hed and subhed tell readers immediately what happened. they are part of the story. it's a package deal. so to argue that we need facts, facts, facts right away doesn't really hold any water, since we did get the quick-hit facts as soon as we looked at the page.

 

I've been told that 'underway' is only used in a nautical sense, otherwise, two words.

 

I agree, it is a package deal. The headline and deckhed -- whether in print or online -- get the nut-graf details across immediately.

So I'm not sure why *the story* needs to stand on its own. Who reads the full lede before the headline, whether in print or online? The only way you're NOT going to know what happened immediately upon glancing at the headline/story package is if you do a compare-and-contrast of the ledes like Kevin Roderick did above -- sans headlines. But who really does that, as a reader?

"Eight found dead at Covina home"/"Man in Santa suit sets fire to house after shooting rampage on Christmas Eve" -- boom, you know what happened. Now here's the how and why, along with more details on the what. That's exactly what we should be doing. Right?

I think you can argue that the LAT story is more overwritten, but it's also better-reported (and it damn well should be, since it's in the Times' friggin' back yard. Of course, that's not a given anymore, with Zell in charge.) So I feel like I got a lot more out of the LAT story than I did anywhere else, and isn't that the whole point?

 

thanks, buck. righto.

 

The dead people were human beings. Especially when it's a local story, tragedy within a daily news cycle needs to be treated as serious news, not as an opportunity for writers to demonstrate a technique, to spin a yarn, to acquire clips, to present human suffering as entertainment rather than the ghastly news that it is. And we wonder why people perceive the news media as predatory, when it appears in times like these that we value our self-interest over theirs?

Again, do you think newspapers should have reported 9/11 or Columbine with a second-day lead? Certainly everyone knew the basic facts even before "special editions" of newspapers were printed a few hours after those tragedies. At how many deaths does that line get drawn? At what point is it acceptable to say, in essence, that all the dead people are not the main thrust of our story, instead we find obscure factoids about the killer to be of far more interest than the actual killings?

Covering such stories requires considerable skills, but those skills ought to be invisible to the readers. It should not be treated like a writer's playground so
soon after people died.

Anyway, it's unlikely that people who have already heard the news yet bought a newspaper anyway are going to think the fact that the killer was supposed to be a church usher that night is the most fascinating part of the story. Knowing the basics, they bought a newspaper because they have an insatiable desire for the gory details. We don't want to appear mercenary in delivering those goods, but the fact is that's why those people plunking coins into the vending machine -- not for some phony buildup of suspense.

 

As mentioned before, Frank has my vote for spj.com editor in chief any day of the week.

But I think he's wrong here.

The reason: I'm fairly certain the LA Times updated an online hard news story on this a million times before they even sat down to write a story for print.

By the time they did, they probably felt the hard-news story was stale and needed a fresh approach.

 

I also dont think narrative is the equivalent to a writing "playground." It's a storytelling technique, no different than the inverted pyramid. Writers don't write this way for clips. They do so because they think it's the best way to tell the story.

People get news a million different ways these days. I'm guessing had the Times gone with a straight news lead, more than half the readers would've stopped after the lead because they would have figured they already knew what was to follow. The Times lead tells the reader right away that new details are to follow.

 

Well, here's The Washington Post's Pulitzer-winning news story about the Virginia Tech shootings. Do you honestly believe people stopped reading after the hard-news lead just because they'd already heard about it on CNN or read about it on the WP's Web site? The Washington Post treated the horrendous news with the gravity it deserved.

http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/7803

 

bingo.
assuming most people will first hear of this story hours later when they buy their newspaper is the kind of thinking that is killing newspapers