Writing the Lead
The summary lead
The lead, or the introduction, is the key to writing an effective news report. The way you write a lead depends on the type of report you're doing. For a "hard news" story-a fire, hijacking, presidential veto, the landing of a probe on Mars-you write what's called a summary lead. This gives readers a complete overview of the story, including the Reporter's Questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How (emphasized according to their importance in the story).
The summary lead is crucial in formats like daily newspapers, because readers often don't finish the whole article, but want to know right away what's going on. Be sure that you don't "bury the lead"-that is, don't make readers wait until the second or third paragraph before they can fully tell what the story is about.
Summary leads are difficult to write, because you have to cram the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How into the standard lead length, which is around 35 words or less. The lead should be one or two sentences at most.
Examples of summary leads
Calling it a victory for family values, President Clinton yesterday signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees employees of larger companies unpaid time off to care for sick or injured family members.
Notice that while the summary lead is easy to understand, it sacrifices some style points to the more important goal of fully informing the reader. The reporter's questions are covered, though to varying degrees:
Who: President Clinton
What: the Family and Medical Leave Act and its purposes
When: yesterday
Where: (covered in the dateline, which tells you the place and date of an event before the text of the story)
Why: to support family values
How: while calling it a victory for family values
In this story, the "Who" and the "What" are the most important points; since the President conducts most of his legislative business in Washington, there's no need to emphasize the "Where."
In another story, say about flooding in Northern California, the "Where" would be more important:
Hundreds of families in northern California's Napa Valley fled their homes yesterday, as the Russian River overflowed its banks after a week of torrential rains.