“When Benedict Cumberbatch was 19 years old, he got good and lost in the Himalayas. No longer a schoolboy in tailcoat and boater, not yet the internationally known star of Sherlock and one of the world’s most unlikely sex symbols, he had taken a gap year before university to get a glimpse of life beyond A-level exams and Sunday chapel.”
This is an example of a anecdotal lede. It continues on for a while, telling the story of a young Benedict Cumberbatch teaching English to Tibetan monks and getting lost in the mountains near Kathmandu. This lede really drew me into the story for several reasons — one, I am a huge fan of Cumberbatch and had never heard the story they were sharing and, two, because it showed me that he was a bit of a thrill seeker, something I wouldn’t have known or expected. So, it told me something new about him and it shared something about his personality that I didn’t know before. I think that makes it a pretty great lede for a profile story. It does demand that I listen to it, just as Edward Murrow instructed Nancy Dickerson a lede should.