The lede is the most important part of a news story. What is a lede? It's not a made up word. It's pronounced lead --as in "I am in the lead," but when newspapers were printed back in the day people used to get it confused with lead (the metal) which was in the ink. So to clear the confusion between production matters (how much lead is in the ink) and editorial matters they changed the spelling. There are two basic ledes, the hard lede and the soft lede. I am personally a fan of the hard lede. Soft ledes are funner to write and more fulfilling, but they can also lose the reader and newspapers already have a problem with losing readers. The hard lede should be quick and to the point and give the reader the basic information in the story. Here is a lede for the story of Little Red Ridding Hood "A 10-year-old girl and her bed-ridden grandmother escaped death yesterday after a woodsman hacked open a cross-dressing wolf that swallowed them whole." The way my professor explains it: Readers are like prisoners in a jail break who want to run away from your story. You have to grab them quick in order to keep them put. So how about I explain a trick that was taught to me when I was still green behind the ears by an old editor at Wired. It's called the "Four Graph Lede." I was told that it's a classic style used by the Wall Street Journal. Keep in mind this is another hard lede, a way to organize your story so that the most information gets to the reader as quickly as possible aka, the inverted pyramid. The first graph should be the basic who, what, where, when. What happened. "A fire destoryed a four story apartment buidling in the South Bronx this afternoon when a tenents' oven exploded, according to fire officials." The second graph should expand on the first, give more detail or paint a picture. "John doe, who lived on the third floor, was cooking meatloaf around 7:00 p.m. when the oven that had been broken for weeks spewed fire across his floor. The fire quickly spread to a neigborhing apartment." Then third graph should explain why this story is important to the reader. Let's face it if you don't live in the Bronx and there is no hero story (somebody jumping into the flames to save a cat) then you need to find relevance to other readers. Since this entire story is phoney, I'll just create some significance. "This is the third fire that has occurred in the South Bronx in five weeks and all the buildings have belonged to the same landlord, Jacob Sparano, who is accused of negligence in keeping his buildings up to code." The fourth graph should be the "Cosmic Quote." This is the best quote that you have from your reporting. The best are quotes from people who sum-up either the 2nd graph or third graph in a succinct and poignant sentence. "I had left several messages to my landlord about that oven, I knew it was broken, but he just ignored me," said John Doe. (In this case I was able to create a quote that touched on both the third and fourth paragraph, but we aren't always that lucky). Again, writing a good lede is not a science, it's an art. It takes practice. I tend to use the four graph lede a lot. Some stories lend themselves to a great third "who cares" graph (the third graph), while other stories have better who, what, where, when graphs (this example is a little dull, I know). Sometimes you get that perfect cosmic quote and other times the people you interview don't even speak English. You just have to learn to work with what you got.