8

Choosing Your Lead

 

 

 

What You’ll Learn_______________________

Remember that maxim used back in Chapter 6, “You’re only as good as your last act”? It’s true in Hollywood and in politics too. A hundred triumphs can be wiped out if your last act falls flat. Well, at risk of putting you in the same category as actors and politicians, journalists also have to heed the maxim, because the second most important part of a report, or of a whole newscast, is the last part—the last sentence, the last story.

Note what I just wrote: the end is “the second most important part.” What’s first? The beginning, or as it’s known in broadcasting, the lead. If you’re producing a newscast and one story in your rundown (the list of stories in a newscast) is an apartment house fire that killed four children, but you lead your newscast with a story about the city council debating what color to paint the curbs in front of City Hall, you have “buried” the lead. Who cares? The audience, which probably will change the channel before your fire story—which should be your lead story—even begins.

The same is true when you’re planning a single story. If, again, it’s about a fatal apartment house fire but you begin your report with the number of fire trucks that responded, you have buried your lead. You haven’t told your audience what they really need to know, and you probably haven’t kept their attention. Lose your audience a few times and eventually you’ll lose the ratings war. After that, your job.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to choose your lead to maximize your story’s impact on the audience. A by-product is that you will capture the attention of your audience from the very beginning and their minds won’t wander. Isn’t that the point? Partly, yes!

(We’ll deal with choosing the lead story when you’re producing an entire newscast, and constructing an intelligent, cohesive, dynamic rundown, in Chapter 17.)

The Terms of the Story_______________________

Rundown The list of stories to run in a newscast, arranged in a logical sequence and timed to fit precisely into the length of the program.

Burial in My Darkest Hour

This chapter’s message begins with a lesson I learned the hard way—the hardest I’d ever learned. All because I buried the lead.

I was in San Francisco covering a story when the pager went off, telling me to call ABC in New York. Their orders? Get to ABC’s San Francisco station—KGO-TV—as quickly as possible. ABC News was about to break into network programming for a Special Report, which I would anchor from KGO’s studio. The story? Mr. and Mrs. Randolph Hearst, newspaper magnates who lived in a wealthy suburb south of the city, had gotten a note from their daughter, Patty.

Now a bit of background: Patty Hearst was heiress to the company her father ran and her grandfather had founded: the Hearst newspaper chain, which eventually also included TV and radio stations. One night, she was kidnapped from her student apartment near the University of California at Berkeley. The group that took her called itself the S.L.A. (Sym-bionese Liberation Army) and rather than demanding a cash ransom, it ordered the Hearsts to spend upwards of $400 million to feed poor people in California.

At some point while she was held hostage, Patty Hearst evidently succumbed to what is known as the Stockholm Syndrome; the captive begins to sympathize with her captors. Eventually she behaved like a full-fledged member of the S.L.A., and was even photographed participating in the robbery of a San Francisco bank.

Okay, back to “Burial in My Darkest Hour.” After weeks of silence from both the S.L.A. and Patty, news organizations got word that she finally had sent her parents some kind of note. What’s more, the parents agreed to appear before the media on the front steps of their home to talk about it. ABC would have a live camera near the Hearsts’ front steps and me in the studio.

The appointed moment came, and the voice of an announcer from network studios in New York intoned over a Special Report graphic, “We interrupt this program to bring you a special report from ABC News. In San Francisco, here’s correspondent Greg Dobbs.”

I started out something like this:

Nine weeks ago, Patty Hearst, heiress to the Hearst newspaper fortune, was kidnapped from her apartment near the University of California at Berkeley. The group that took her? The Symbionese Liberation Army. No one had heard of this group before the kidnapping; everyone knows about it now.

And on, and on, and on I went, telling and retelling the history of the story, leading up to the forthcoming event that had us on the air now. I told of the episodes of feeding the poor people, negotiations for more food, Patty Hearst’s apparent conversion from student to militant (known from a series of “communiques” issued by the S.L.A., some with Patty’s voice). What I didn’t tell was the actual reason we had interrupted regular programming: that after weeks without a word from their daughter, Patty’s parents had gotten a note and soon would come out of their house to talk about it.

I can’t tell you how many viewers switched stations, but since I was recounting history that everyone already knew, the numbers must have been massive. And more would have switched away if the president of ABC News hadn’t suddenly yelled through my earpiece, “Tell the f****** story!!!” (I later learned that he was watching from his home, and called the control room and snapped something like, “Patch me through to Dobbs. I wanna talk to him, NOW.”)

Let me tell you, when your boss, the person who approves your paychecks and can order your dismissal, shouts a command like that, it gets your attention! What he was saying was, Tell the audience why they’re watching. Tell ’em the Hearsts got a note. Tell ’em we’re waiting for the Hearsts to come outside and talk about it. Tell ’em the news!

Good point. I had told them everything but the news. I had backed into the story. I had buried the lead.

Only a moment after my boss’s loving missive, my brain clicked into gear and I got to the critical news. Thankfully, just moments after that, the Hearsts appeared and my you-know-what was saved. So was my job. It was a painful but permanent lesson about not burying the lead. But still, it was my Darkest Hour.

What’s the Point?

It’s news. So tell it. First. Don’t bury the lead!

How to Recognize the Lead If It Doesn’t Recognize You

In some stories the lead is obvious: four dead in a fire; the Hearsts finally hear from Patty. In cases like that, you don’t have to think very hard to figure out how to start your story; it kind of jumps out at you as the inevitable choice.

But in other cases—most cases, in my experience—you do have to think about it and you do have to make a choice. So here are the three questions you must ask:

1. What’s the most important thing about this story?

2. What’s the most interesting thing about this story?

3. What’s the most immediate thing (the most recent development) about this story?

If you ask and answer those questions, choosing your lead will be a slam dunk.

Pretend you’re in my sorry shoes for the Hearst story in San Francisco. I won’t list all the facts here, but here are a few. Read through them and ask yourself, which is the most important, and/or the most interesting, and/or the most immediate?

• Hearst kidnapped February

• Taken from student apartment near Cal (nickname for U.C. Berkeley)

• Parents William and Catherine

• Food giveaways for Calif poor

• SLA demand $400-m, Hearsts counter $2-m.

• Stockholm Syndrome—from notes & tapes

• Parents get note today

• Contents unknown—parents to talk on front steps

Is there any question about your lead? This one’s easy, because the fact that Patty finally sent her parents a note became, in the context of the whole story, the most important and interesting and immediate development! (If I had thought about it there at the anchor desk in San Francisco, I might have come to the same conclusion and saved myself some embarrassment and angst.)

It’s not always so easy though, because in some stories, one fact might be the most important but another is the most interesting, and some third element might be the most immediate. The most immediate fact is especially useful as a lead when you’re rehashing the same story over and over again, which is most common with radio newscasts that have to change every hour. Otherwise, when you’ve get three choices, it’s a judgment call. Take into account not just the three questions, but try to figure out which one most likely will capture the attention of your audience.

So look at the questions again:

1. What’s the most important thing about this story?

2. What’s the most interesting thing about this story?

3. What’s the most immediate thing (the most recent development) about this story?

What’s the Point?

Make sure that whatever you choose for your lead is the most important, most interesting, and/or most immediate element of the story.

Choosing One Lead From among More Than One

As I said in the last section, sometimes you don’t have a single element that fulfills all the requirements of a good lead. That’s when you have to pick and choose. That’s what this section is about.

While based in ABC’s Denver bureau in the 1990s, we had what was then the Mother Of All Blizzards: 22 inches of snow fell in parts of Colorado. It was the snowiest January day ever. World News Tonight wanted a story (probably to make the show’s producers feel good about living in New York). The “twenty-two inches in a single day” angle seemed like a pretty obvious lead, but there were a few other elements to think about:

• Forecasters had predicted between one and three inches, not 22

• Interstate 70 was closed from Denver to the Kansas border

• Visibility for motorists reportedly was less than a car length

• Denver’s airport, which always boasted “We never close,” did, which put 30,000 travellers in a holding pattern

• Most schools closed, or never even opened

• The storm finally was moving out, to the northeast

In this case, what was most important to some people was less important to others. If you were heading for Colorado by road, you wanted to know about the roads. If you were heading there by air, you wanted to know about the airport. If you were a student in a Colorado school, you probably didn’t care; you were skiing, sledding, or throwing snowballs.

Therefore, I didn’t think I could choose my lead based on what was “most important.” Rather, I decided to go with “most interesting.” While some people might think that twenty-two inches in twenty-four hours is awfully interesting, I thought the most interesting thing was that the forecasters, having predicted just one to three inches, had gotten it so wrong. That’s where the judgment call comes in. So here’s how I decided to start:

NARRATION

Forecasters predicted one-to-three inches of snow. Turned out to be an inch-or-more an hour when the blizzard reached its peak.

Remember, to convey the depth of the snow, I had pictures to help me. Pictures of snow up to the high fenders of a truck, or up to someone’s waist. The opening line—the lead—didn’t contradict what viewers were seeing, it reinforced the wonder of it!

Now here’s a different kind of example from a different kind of story, done for Good Morning America. It was based on a phenomenon, pegged to an event. Namely, the nation’s major brewers preparing to tell the United States Surgeon General that their print ads and broadcast commercial campaigns to discourage drunk driving deserved credit for lower drunk driving casualties among the nation’s young. The lead:

NARRATION

Accidents involving alcohol still are the leading cause of death and disability for young people. But in the last ten years, the number of such accidents has dropped. The nation’s brewers will tell the Surgeon General today, they deserve some credit.

SOT ANHEUSER-BUSCH SPOKESWOMAN

We’re members of society ourselves. We have children, we’re parents, we drive on the nation’s highways too, and we don’t want drunk drivers out there.

The dilemma was, do I begin the way I did, saying that drunk driving accidents still are the leading cause of death and disability for the young? Arguably, that was the most important single fact in the story. Or do I begin by saying that the number of drunk driving accidents hurting or killing young people has dropped? Or that the nation’s brewers wanted credit for reducing drunk driving accidents involving young people? (Some people who don’t like the brewing industry would find that pretty interesting!)

Another judgment call. And perhaps the judgment was partly editorial in nature. On the one hand, drunk driving accidents with young people had been reduced. On the other hand, they hadn’t been eliminated. As critics of the brewing industry had charged while I researched the story, the brewers—using catchy phrases like “know when to say when” but never directly referring to “drunk driving”—hadn’t gone nearly far enough.

So the decision was, the ongoing accident rate was the most important element in the story. It said, “this is a problem, it hasn’t gone away.” Then the story would describe how the problem wasn’t as bad as it used to be, and get to what the brewers wanted: credit for the improvement.

Could it have been written differently? Of course. Here’s one way:

NARRATION

The nation’s brewers will tell the Surgeon General today that because of their commercial campaign, they deserve some credit for the lower rate of accidents involving young people and alcohol.

Here’s another:

NARRATION

Accidents involving young people and alcohol haven’t gone away, but there are fewer now than ten years ago. The nation’s brewers will tell the Surgeon General today, they deserve some credit.

Each example is different. Even insofar as the opening video, the first and third examples would start with video of a relevant dramatic accident, but the middle example would start with a beer industry commercial. However, all three versions have a common thread. All three begin with something that someone could credibly call the most important fact. Who’s right? It doesn’t matter, as long as you can support your decision.

What’s the Point?

There are three objective questions you can ask when choosing your lead. But sometimes the answers are subjective. As long as you are honest to the process, there is no wrong answer.

The Exception to Every Rule

You knew it was coming, didn’t you? The exception to the rule is that while it’s true that you should figure out your lead based on the three questions about the most important, interesting, and/or immediate fact, it’s also true that sometimes your best video won’t be any of the three.

If, for example, you cover a horrible fire in an apartment house where four people have died, but your camera and microphone have captured an irresistibly dramatic scene of a woman holding an infant up on a third-floor balcony with flames lapping at their backs and she is screaming “help me, help me, my baby, my baby” (and eventually the woman and baby are rescued alive), what’re you going to show first? A fire truck rushing to the fire? A fireman connecting a hose? NO! Start with your best stuff. Start with the woman holding her baby, screaming for their lives. It’s for television. That’s your lead! I guarantee you, use an opening like that and the audience won’t get up and leave in the middle of the story.

But what about the most important fact, that four people are dead? You can get to it soon enough (you must). So here’s a reasonable opening for the story.

NARRATION

This woman and her baby survived, but four people died today when…”

Simple enough, eh? We began with the best picture, but after only half-a-dozen words, we told the most important fact—the lead. You always can return to that dramatic video later in the piece if there is more to show. For the beginning of the story, we have whetted the audience’s appetite. Okay, now two more examples of writing a lead, based on the picture:

In a story about a fund raising campaign for the American Indian College Fund, the most important fact was that the Fund had based its future on the campaign. The most interesting fact was that there are more than two dozen colleges now established on Indian reservations. The most immediate was that these colleges had just achieved a graduation (and post-graduation employment) rate of almost 90 percent.

But we began with a shot of Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency, Montana, showing a classroom with plywood floors and cinderblock walls. The shot said to the audience, “this isn’t like any college you’ve ever seen.” And I said essentially the same thing in the lead sentences of the script:

NARRATION

With cinderblock walls and plywood floors, Little Big Horn College isn’t Harvard. Its founders have a different kind of dream.

Another example is a feature story about the oldest postal carrier in the country. He was Don Taylor, ninety-five years old, operating out of Lusk, Wyoming. Conventional wisdom says you should start by showing the man—after all, he was ninety-five! But what struck me was that he not only was the nation’s oldest postal carrier, he also delivered the mail in what had to be pretty much the most difficult conditions in the country. So we opened the piece with video of a desolate, windswept, hardscrabble Wyoming plain, with a lone ranch house way off in the distance, and wrote the leading line:

NARRATION

Postal routes don’t get a whole lot more rural than this.

In the very next line, I explained that Don Taylor drove sixty-six miles every day, mostly on dirt roads, to deliver mail to twenty-nine Wyoming families. And of course, that neither rain, nor snow, nor heat, nor gloom of night had ever stopped him. Nor age!

One last thing. Sometimes audio dictates your lead, not video. In radio of course, audio is the only element other than information. But in television, you might use a shot of an airplane taking off because the sound of the jet engines is powerful, and relevant to the subject of the story. Or in the case of the piece about the brewers and their broadcast commercial campaign, you might choose the most revealing spoken line from a commercial, and start with it.

What’s the Point?

If it’s for television, video trumps all. If the video makes sense along with the lead fact of the story, great. If it doesn’t, use it anyway. Just make sure you get to the real lead as soon as you can.

After You’ve Picked It, You Have to Write It

Choosing a good lead is one thing. Writing it is another. The most important principle is that when writing the first sentence of a story, you should bend over backwards to apply the rules about simplicity that you’ve already learned here. Then bend over backwards again! If your lead sentence is too long, too complex, too packed with information, you might confuse your audience and lose them for the story’s duration. For instance, from my own collection of lousy leads:

NARRATION

For the last 30 years there has been an almost ceaseless flow of lava from Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, here on the big island of Hawaii, and for the last 15 years, defying the laws of nature, some of Kilauea’s lava has flowed right back.

Yuk! In this story about people illegally taking lava rock home with them and then, after bad luck befell them, returning it because of local superstitions, I could have made the opening much better by taking one single step: dividing it into two sentences instead of one:

For the last 30 years there has been an almost ceaseless flow of lava from Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes. For the last 15 years, defying the laws of nature, some of Kilauea’s lava has flowed right back.

In the following feature about the ongoing construction of the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota (it will be bigger than Mt. Rushmore), I did even worse:

NARRATION

Here in the Black Hills not 20 miles from Mt. Rushmore, another mountain is being carved, not to memorialize the heroes of democracy but to show, in the words of a Sioux chief, that “the red man had great heroes too.”

I didn’t need the Black Hills reference, not in the lead sentence. And I didn’t have to contrast the purpose of Crazy Horse with the purpose of Mt. Rushmore, at least not in the lead sentence.

Look at how much better, shorter, and sharper, it would have been if I had thought it through more carefully:

Not 20 miles from Mt. Rushmore, another mountain is being carved to show, in the worlds of a Sioux chief, that “the red man had great heroes too.”

And now, having sorted through old scripts, here’s the worst-constructed lead I could find. Why so bad? Because it seems like I’m trying to tell the whole story—setting the scene, explaining the purpose—in a single run-on sentence.

NARRATION

Here in the high country of Colorado, amidst sparkling streams and thousands of species of plants, an experiment has been set up on a sloping meadow with infrared heaters hanging overhead, simulating the greenhouse effect.

Take a look at that one. This time, you figure out how you can make it simpler, shorter, and better!

What’s the Point?

Take it easy. Make it easy. Don’t try to squeeze too much into your lead. If you have details— figures, times, names and so forth—see if you can find a place to put them deeper into the script. Remember, for the audience it only goes by once. Don’t let it be cluttered or confusing.

Another Exception: Soft as You Go

Although for the purpose of illustrating the main points of this chapter there have been exceptions (such as the “Greenhouse” example a few paragraphs back), fundamentally I’ve written here about “hard” leads. But sometimes a “soft” lead makes more sense. Not for a hard news story but for a soft story, a feature story. This is when you can slowly lure your audience into the piece, perhaps leading with a scene setter, or with an individual whose story is a microcosm of the bigger picture.

One example is a story about a financial shortfall at our nation’s National Park Service. We chose to tell the story from Utah’s spectacular Lake Powell, because there weren’t enough rangers, paramedics, litter collectors, or lifeguards there.

But I didn’t want to start by writing something mundane like, “There aren’t enough rangers, paramedics, litter collectors, or lifeguards here at Lake Powell.” (And don’t forget, sometimes the “setup” for the story is handled in the anchorperson’s introduction.) Nor did I want to start with the big picture, something like, “budgets at the National Park Service have not kept up with visitation.” It was true, but there was nothing in it to lure the audience. So bearing in mind the beautiful video we had shot, I chose a soft lead:

NARRATION

Lake Powell is one of America’s most scenic sites run by the National Park Service. Being within a day’s drive of 25-million people, it also is one of the most successful.

Another example is a story about an elementary school that welcomed senior citizens as classroom volunteers, giving them a rebate on their property taxes in return. Again, I could have started with something basic like, “Schools in the Denver suburb of Littleton Colorado are using the skills of senior citizens in their classrooms, and giving them a tax break in return.” But that just didn’t sound very interesting. Likewise, a line like, “Littleton Colorado helps senior citizens save money by getting involved in their schools.” True, but not personal enough for the story. So I wrote the lead this way:

NARRATION

Dorothy DeJong, 64 years old and retired, has time on her hands. She never has found volunteer work fulfilling. That’s not a problem any more.

From there we went to a piece of NAT SOT in which Mrs. DeJong walked into a classroom saying to a little girl, “Well hi, how are ya Jessica, good to see you…” It was warm and touching, and set up the rest of the story perfectly.

As you should understand by now, your lead is designed to capture the audience, and the purpose of the soft lead is to capture that audience when none of those classic “hard lead” elements—most important, most interesting, most immediate—is quite enough. It would be fruitless to try to describe the variety of soft leads available on many stories; there are as many possibilities as there are stories. Suffice to say that if you make it your goal to start your story with the most compelling words, the most compelling thought, the most compelling video, you’ve done it right.

What’s the Point?

A soft lead is rarely appropriate for a hard news story. Even some soft stories are better off without it. But sometimes, if pictures and sound lend themselves, it works, which means it helps get the audience involved in the story, the characters, and the subject.

And on the Second Day…

What do you do when you’re reporting the same story more than once? Maybe it’s on a later newscast the same day, maybe it’s on a newscast the following day (or even for days after that). The answer is, you write a “second day” lead.

What this means is, you tell the same story a different way. Here’s where the “most immediate” fact can be helpful. Even if there’s no major new development in the story, a minor development helps give you a fresh lead. Maybe it’s a new charge against a recently arrested suspect. Maybe it’s a new death toll in a plane crash.

But when you don’t even have a recent development, you sometimes have to rewrite the same story. One of the best examples is coverage in Anchorage, Alaska of the trial of Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the supertanker Exxon Valdez. It had run aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil and spoiling hundreds of miles of coastline and countless birds and fish. Hazelwood was characterized as a drunken skipper and charged with criminal mischief.

When the verdict came down, acquitting Hazelwood of the serious charge and convicting him only for a mild misdemeanor, it was a major story. The verdict broke just before air time for World News Tonight, so I had to hustle and write a piece for them, then several pieces for the ongoing newscasts of ABC Radio, then prepare a piece for Nightline and, after that, one for Good Morning America. All based on the same verdict, the same information, the same facts.

How to do it? By taking all my information and choosing a different lead for each piece. Each ultimately would contain all the same facts, but in a different order. Maybe the best way to demonstrate this is simply to give you the opening for each of the newscasts.

Remember, whether television or radio, each piece was preceded by an anchorperson’s intro, so I didn’t have to begin with the basics.

(World News Tonight)

NARRATION

After eight weeks of trial by jury and exactly a year now of trial by public opinion, Joseph Hazelwood finally won a decision.

Sot Judge Karl Johnstone

We the jury find the defendant Joseph Hazelwood not guilty of criminal mischief...

(ABC Radio #1)

An alternate from the jury, a woman who heard every argument, every word of testimony, says she would have acquitted Joseph Hazelwood. She says the prosecution failed to prove that on the night of the spill, Hazelwood was drunk.

(ABC Radio #2)

Technically Hazelwood was judged guilty of a crime: the negligent discharge of oil. But that’s a misdemeanor, and with a maximum penalty of 90 days in jail and a thousand-dollar fine, it’s the mildest misdemeanor with which he was charged.

(ABC Radio #3)

The jury, while it deliberated for only ten-and-a-half hours, didn’t reach its decision easily. On each of the four charges against Hazelwood, the jury had to vote more than once before reaching unanimity.

(Nightline)

The state’s case against Captain Hazelwood centered on his absence from the bridge when the ship, on a delicate detour to avoid icebergs, ran aground.

(Good Morning America)

Note how we used the same sound we had used in the World News Tonight piece the night before, but even higher in the story.

SOT JUDGE KARL JOHNSTONE

We the jury find the defendant Joseph Hazelwood not guilty of criminal mischief...

NARRATION

Not guilty in fact of any charge except the mildest misdemeanor: “negligent discharge of oil.”

What’s the Point?

Whether it’s because you have a lot of newscasts to cover, or because news is slow and you have to keep a story alive just to fill air time (yes, it happens), you have to be inventive. Don’t assume every member of each new audience hasn’t heard it before. Assume they have. So you must keep it interesting, keep it fresh.

Exercises to Put Your Lead in the Lead______________

1. Secondhand Rose.

Choose the headline story from today’s newspaper. Whatever it is, write four different leads for the same story, as if you’re working at a radio station with newscasts every half hour. You want your four consecutive stories to each sound fresh.

2. Hard and Soft

From the same newspaper, clip out three “hard” news stories, and three “soft” stories. Label each as “hard” or “soft” and turn them in to your instructor, demonstrating that you recognize the difference.

3. Drama as Your Best Lead

Now, find a story in the paper which, pretending you have covered it for television, has a dramatic, breathtaking, or colorful element in it that begs to be the lead, even though it isn’t necessarily the most important, interesting or immediate fact. Now, write it up the way you would for television, making reference to that irresistible opening element but quickly making your transition to the real lead of the story.

4. Most Important, Most Interesting, Most Immediate

Here is the same randomly ordered list of facts and other items about a fatal fire (except the sound bite verbatims and NAT SOT) that you worked with in the last chapter. Pare it down to just three—the most important, the most interesting, and the most immediate.