Blog 10: Good Leads

Blog 10: Good Leads

Writing a good lead is hard! This was always my least favorite part of Media Writing, and I still struggle with it. Luckily, editing leads and determining what makes a lead “good” is a lot easier than writing the lead myself. As I searched the internet for good leads, I found a few that stuck out more than the others.

This example came from CNN. The story was interesting, so I opened the article to see what kind of lead it had. This lead has two parts. First, the lead, then the nut graph.

“It's been a long time running -- four decades to be exact -- since an American woman broke the finish line tape at the New York City Marathon, but Olympic medalist Shalane Flanagan did just that on Sunday.

With an unofficial time of 2 hours, 26 minutes and 53 seconds, the 36-year-old Flanagan beat three-time defending champion Mary Keitany of Kenya by a minute and one second. Times won't be official until later this month.”

This lead is more of an impact lead because it shows the impact this story is making. Not only did the runner accomplish something, but she was the first American in 40 years to do it. Therefore, this lead makes an impact on the reader.

The example I found this week is fantastic. Figuring out where to put an apostrophe is always confusing, especially when the base word is plural. In this example, they correctly put the apostrophe on “companies’ websites,” but they could not decide where to put the apostrophe on “Men’s running shoes.”