The Art Of The Lede
January 22, 2009
Author 
In 
image credit: un ragazzo chiamato bi
You hear it everywhere: if you want a successful blog – write short, pithy posts. Nonsense.
Length is irrelevant – just craft a strong lede. If your writing is good, smart people will read the whole thing, I promise. But you have to entice them.
…people don’t read every word anymore. They skim – and most people don’t even do that.” The same behavior applies to social media, especially where Twitter has users trained on 140 character sound bites.
He’s got a point – both mass and social media are guilty of infecting hordes of people with attention deficit disorder. Look at any story on CNN.com, you get something at the top like this:
(from A blogger’s inauguration)
They’re basically encouraging you to skip the story and read just the bullet points. There’s even a link guiding you to the next article in the section. No denying it, the web is a fast-paced medium where many people, even those who are extremely smart end up skimming.
Here is your challenge: slow them down when they get to your writing.
How you begin your writing sets the pace for not only if someone will skim versus read your content, but whether they will read it at all.
It doesn’t matter if your post has bullet points, is cleanly formatted, in list format, or broken up with headings. All of those things make content on an LCD screen easier on your eyes, but are irrelevant for getting people to actually read your work carefully. The secret is the lede (or lead) is all that matters.
Unfortunately, I can’t teach you how to write great ledes. No one can, it is an art form learned through trail and error, experimentation and experience.
That is why it kills me that every marketer, PR professional and journalist doesn’t blog. Never before have communications professionals had unrestricted freedom to test their ideas in the wild, free, whenever they want. You can see how all your content does, what people actually click on, how deep the interactions are, if readers share it, and use this information to polish your writing and your ledes.
Learning by getting feedback from others is nice, but you’re missing half the picture when you can now actually get raw data on your writing at your fingertips. Data is unbiased. You have a real opportunity here to learn and grow.
I don’t mind sharing a sample of something I wrote with a lede I particularly liked and the numbers along with it.
This is some of the data from my article titled: Your Resume Is Meaningless (And Building Career Security, Not Job Security)
Out of a more than 1K unique pageviews during the month of August, the average time spent on this page was a bit over 5 minutes. So I know that most people read the entire piece. I’d attribute the average time spent on that story entirely to the lede.
I know I said above I can’t show you how to write great ledes. I wish it was that easy, it’s a fluid process like anything else, and I’m learning just like you are. But I can share what has been successful for me personally:
Keep it simple at the start
We are all busy, and busy people are daunted by huge blocks of text. You can get into more details as you delve in further, but if you want people to get that far you need to make the first part easily consumable. Ease people into deeper content by starting them off with something simple. Just as good music builds as a progression, so does writing.
Provoke emotion
Your lede needs to hook people. Be mysterious, be assertive, be counter-intuitive, be inquisitive, be hyper-logical or equally illogical. I know this is journalism 101 to most of you, but it is worth repeating. You can lead them down the intellectual path shortly thereafter, they will be primed for it. It’s basic psychology to make inroads emotionally with someone to reach them intellectually.
Challenge things everyone believes
Really. Go against the herd, balk at conventional wisdom. Tell people that their view of the world is wrong in the first sentence. Then explain why. Many things everyone believes are wrong, so this is actually not hard to do.
Play to an audience
Tell an inside joke in the beginning and don’t bother to explain it. People who are into it will get it – if you do this right everyone else should be intrigued enough to Google it and catch up.
Get under their skin
If you’re savvy in your subject matter, use what you know to your advantage. Alternatively do some research to find something which you know will get under the skin of a certain group. This is also a strategy to get comments.
Take your time
Never rush your lede. Even more importantly, don’t force the lede. Seriously, don’t even write it if you have to force it. At that point you are writing just to write. Good ledes are products of a flow experience.
Conclusion
There are no longer editors, space limits and or hard and fast rules for writing ledes. You can play with formats, images, video, copy, animations – anything you want – the key is to be unafraid to try things out. Break any and all traditional rules, you may find something that works for you which is unique and breaks through the clutter. Experiment and play are encouraged – don’t be constrained by anything.
Related posts from The Future Buzz
Why I Write Detailed, In-Depth Posts
The 48 Laws Of Power Applied To Blogging
How To Overcome Writer’s Block – 15 Tips
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The Best Website Taglines Around the Internet (Daily Blog Tips)
Does Your Website Have Personality? (The Van Blog)
How To Do More With Less (Shoestring Branding)
Tim Jahn replied | Jan 22, 2009 (59 comments)
Great points here, Adam. Most important I think is keeping blocks of text short. People don’t prefer long paragraphs like they used to as you discuss.
I’m at CNN from time to time and I never realized how bad that bullet list really is! They truly are encouraging you to read 3 bullet points and move on. Unbelievable!
Craig Kanalley replied | Jan 23, 2009 (1 comment)
Right on, Adam. I had one of your articles from a while back bookmarked (it was on community news), and came across your site again through that. Checked if you had any new/recent posts and found this. I agree with you it’s all about the lede and it also amazes me how many journalists/PR professionals don’t have their own blogs. A perfect opportunity to experiment.
I’m a young aspiring journalist, currently in grad school in Chicago, with a huge interest in social media/new media. Just got back from twittering at the Inauguration in D.C. (@dannythedemon) and I really think stuff like that is the future of journalism.
Tim Buckley replied | Jan 29, 2009 (1 comment)
“Lede” is familiar to journalists and PR folks, for sure. You describe it well and have great pointers. When I talk about this to newbies I use the concept of “good storytelling.” Whether essays, letters to the editor, blog posts, magazine articles or books, that opening three paragraphs are key. Keep up the good work!
Greg Dawe replied | Apr 27, 2009 (4 comments)
As a TEFL teacher – Teaching English as a Foreign Language – lead-ins are one of the first things you learn about. If 8 a.m. in a freezing vocational college on the outskirts of Beijing is not on your itinarary, I will say that lead-ins need to pique the interest of (insert demographic) – Chinese teenagers in my case – and raise a question in their head that they can relate to, identify with, want to know the answer to.
If you can do this in a way which leaves your students feeling like they are discovering something for themselves – using their very own intellects to work out your target language – then you’ve got them for the rest of the lesson. Show them a picture of their favorite singer and ask them about what kind of music s/he sings about – something they may have to consult other students/dictionary(therefore learn) to explain in English. It’s like active learning, the student is as much a part of the lesson (hopefully more) than the teacher. If the student is involved at this depth, is interacting – becoming part of the lesson – then he is invested in the lesson and harder to bore.