Bury the lede?

Reader question:

Please explain this sentence: Let’s not bury the lede here, and instead get right down to business.

My comments:

In other words, let’s be straight forward and call a spade a spade.

Let’s not bury the “lead”, that is, lede being an old word for lead.

Bury the lead?

The lead refers to the lead sentence or paragraph of a news story, usually giving out the most important detail or fact.

Bury the lead?

Non journalists or poorly trained ones (yeah, currently it looks like a lot of the young journalists milling about are poorly trained) can be forgiven for not knowing or not being clear about it, but to “bury the lead” is to bury the most important fact deep among other, lesser facts and not to tell it first.

For example, if two people were killed in a traffic accident down the street earlier this morning, say so in your report: two people were killed in a car collision at, say, 7:50 this morning.

Rush hour may have contributed to this accident, and the smog, too, perhaps the drizzle likewise, but leave these details for later – if you are allowed any space for them at all.

Yeah, basically, that’s the idea.

Instead, talk about the drizzle, or smog or the rush hour jam first and you will be accused of burying the lead, which is a big journalistic no-no.

All journalists try very hard to make their lead interesting so that readers might be enticed to read further, and that is only right. But the most important point is, be factual and accurate and tell first the reader what you most want them to know first.

First, that is, and foremost.

In other words, in a straightforward news story, don’t open your article like many long-read New Yorker feature stories: In the summer of 1965, a group of scientists gathered etc, etc, etc.

Or as Thomas Hardy opens The Mayor of Casterbridge, like this: “One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span….”

See? If you open your story this way, it will take the read more time (and patience) to find out what’s going on. For a straightforward news story about facts, growth in the economy, latest European Championship soccer results, crimes and murders, you need to hurry up.

Hurry up and tell the facts fast – and that means first.

In other words, first things first.

This is not to say that delaying the lead does not work. Of course it often does, especially if any aspiring young journalists move on to better things, such as writing long feature articles for the New Yorker, but for the moment, let’s stick to the point and say it point blank:

Don’t bury the lead.

Okay, here are media examples to put “burying the lede or lead” in more contexts:

1. In journalism, it’s called “burying the lead”: A story starts off with what everyone already knows, while the real news—the most surprising, significant or never-been-told-before information—gets pushed down where people are less likely to see it.

That’s what happened to the findings of the media study of the uncounted votes from last year’s Florida presidential vote. A consortium of news outlets—including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tribune Co. (Newsday’s parent company), The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and CNN—spent nearly a year and $900,000 reexamining every disputed ballot.

The consortium determined that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed the ongoing recount to go through, George W. Bush would still likely have ended up in the White House. That’s because the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court—as well as the more limited recount asked for by Democratic candidate Al Gore—only involved so-called undervotes, ballots that when counted mechanically registered no choice for president.

Gore and the Florida Supreme Court ignored overvotes—votes where mechanical counting registered more than one vote—on the assumption that there would be no way to tell which of the multiple candidates the voter actually intended to pick.

But as the consortium found when it actually looked at the overvotes, one often could tell what the voter’s intent was. Many of the overvotes involved, for example, a voter punching the hole next to a candidate’s name, and then writing in the same candidate’s name.

Since the intent of the voter is clear, these are clearly valid votes under Florida law. And Gore picked up enough of such votes that it almost didn’t matter what standard you used when looking at undervotes—whether you counted every dimple or insisted on a fully punched chad, the consortium found that Gore ended up the winner of virtually any full reexamination of rejected ballots.

So there are two main findings: The Supreme Court’s intervention probably did not affect the outcome of the limited recounts then under way, and more people probably cast valid votes for Gore than for Bush.

If the first finding was the important news, the consortium was scooped long ago: The Miami Herald and USA Today, working as a separate team, published stories in April that argued persuasively that the particular recounts that were halted by the Supreme Court probably would have produced a Bush victory.

What’s new is the finding that, since voters are supposed to decide elections rather than lawyers or judges, the state’s electoral votes appear to have gone to the wrong candidate. Given that the outcome in Florida determined the national victor, this is not just news but a critical challenge to the legitimacy of the presidency.

So how did the media report the results of the ballot reexamination?

Overwhelmingly, they chose to lead with the news that was comfortable, uncontroversial—and seven months old. “In Election Review, Bush Wins Without Supreme Court Help,” was The Wall Street Journal’s headline on its story, paralleling The New York Times’ “Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote.” That angle would be fine if you believed that the Supreme Court was the most important aspect of the story; but what about the presidency?

- BURYING THE LEAD: Who really won the Florida presidential election last November? BaltimoreChronicle.com, December 5, 2001.

2. “Don’t bury the lede.” That’s what everyone always says to writers. Get to the point. Just give us the information we need.

It’s great advice for journalists. Horrible advice for marketers.

“Don’t bury the lede” is a phrase for reporters who write crime blurbs and short local interest pieces. It’s for articles that start with “Mayor So & So announced yesterday that he was going to do X, Y, Z” and then go on to tell you in forensic detail what happened, who was involved, where, why, how, etc. The news world is based on unbiased facts and conveying information efficiently. “Don’t bury the lede” is for journalists and their editors, not storytellers.

Imagine if the first scene of The Lord of the Rings was the council meeting where Frodo volunteers to carry the ring, or imagine ripping out the first 50-100 pages of your favorite novel. Imagine if every blog entry you read told you everything you needed to know in the first sentence. How boring would that be?

The lede is designed to pique your interest, but also be enough that you pretty much get the gist of the piece without reading on. A story is engineered to hook you emotionally so that you MUST continue. It poses unanswered questions that you need to see resolved. The lede is a polite “Would you like to know more?” where a great story grabs you and won’t let you go.

“Don’t bury the lede” thinking would have turned the Dove Real Beauty campaign into a video of a man in a suit saying something like “Over 60% of women see themselves as less beautiful than as described by strangers.” Then it would go on to explain the methodology, but why would you stick around? By not “burying the lede”, they’ve spoiled the ending.

To work, a story needs a proper beginning. It needs a set up where you establish the context and the stakes for what’s to come.

So, in broader terms, your brand story can’t be “Our widgets save you time.” That’s Don’t Bury the Lede thinking. Storyteller thinking says you have to first show your audience that you understand them and their challenges. You have to establish the context and the stakes. You might assure your audience that you know how busy they are and how that makes them feel distant from their families, for example. Being stressed or overworked can tear even the closest families apart, so wouldn’t it be great if your users were less overwhelmed and they could spend more time with their loved ones? Well, that’s what your brand is all about. Your brand is about bringing families together by making their lives a little easier, and you use your Widgets to do just that.

That’s a story that engages emotionally. It’s not a straight-shootin’ sidebar on page C26 of a newspaper.

Remember, we’re marketers, not journalists. We’re not writing research papers or police reports. We’re storytellers. So, if it serves the needs of your story, go ahead and bury that lede. Bury it and make people really feel something.

- Go Ahead & Bury the Lede, NeboAgency.com, November 19, 2013.

3. Police in Lake Mary, Florida have released audio from the 911 call made on Monday after Matthew Apperson allegedly shot George Zimmerman through his car window, causing a “minor gunshot wound” after what authorities are calling an “ongoing dispute” between the two men that dates back to last fall.

“The guy right here just said he had to shoot someone through his window, so he wants the police to come,” the unidentified caller can be heard telling a 911 dispatcher in the short recording, seriously burying the lead in the process. “He said it was George Zimmerman.”

Police recovered two guns from Apperson’s car, including a 357 revolver they say he used to shoot Zimmerman, along with a Glock from Zimmerman’s car. They are currently investigating the incident and no charges have been filed.

- LISTEN: Police Release 911 Call from George Zimmerman Shooting Incident, MediaITE.com, May 12th, 2017.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.