Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

This morning's lead exercise stressed me out.

Before we got to writing our own, though, Steve's prompt to think of the most compelling lead we recalled took me back to an exercise I did with my yearbook kids a month ago.  I Googled "excellent ledes" (more on spelling below) and came across this:

"Gary Robinson died hungry.

"He had a taste for Church's fried chicken. He wanted the three-piece box for $2.19, plus tax.

"Instead he got three bullets..."

It's an excerpt from a piece in the Miami Herald written by Edna Buchanan back in 1985. Buchanan covered the Herald's police beat for 18 years.

Here's a piece the New Yorker ran on Buchanan in 1986: "Covering the Cops" – Calvin Trillin

I'm a typography geek, and the lead/lede language is something my kids stumble across every year. As it was explained to me (feel free to correct me in a comment below), a "lede" (pronounced "LEED") is the first line of a story, but was not spelled "lead," which can be pronounced to rhyme with "HEAD." Back in the days of printing on a manual printing press, bars of lead (the metal, rhymes with "HEAD") were used as spacing between lines. Hence in publishing today and in InDesign, we talk about spacing as "leading" (rhymes with "HEADING.") Therefore, the first line of a story--the "lead" (rhymes with "FEED")--was re-spelled as "lede" (rhymes with "FEED" as well) back in the day. In the past, then, a LEDE was the first line/graph of a story. LEAD is a metal, and LEADING is the space between lines of a story. We still call spacing in layout leading today. Again, feel free to chime in below if I've gotten this wrong. Today, as Steve's presentation pointed out, lead is more common, or is at least interchangeable with lede.

-Mike Simons
 West HS / East HS
 Corning-Painted Post NY