Lede: How would you fake cancer? Shave your head? Pluck your eyebrows? Install a chemo port into your neck? These days you don’t need to. Belle Gibson’s story is a masterclass on faking cancer in the modern age. She fooled Apple, Cosmopolitan, Elle and Penguin. She fooled the hundreds of thousands who bought her app, read her blog and believed that her story could be their story.

This lede is unusual. As journalists, we are often told not to start with a question, but there is something striking about the way the Guardian writer starts with the question, “How would you fake cancer?” The last four sentences that make up the graph sums up Belle Gibson’s crazy stunt well, and sucks the readers in. However, I don’t think leading with four sentences was necessary. The first question would have carried the shock.

 

I chose this story from SLR because I thought the idea of a sad hotel room was interesting and would be a story full of emotion and depth. The lead definitely introduced that idea of melancholy depth.

Read the story here.

• Story: “Is China’s gaokao the world’s toughest school exam?” by Alec Ash
• What kind of lede is it? A scene-setter lede
• Does it do what Edward R. Murrow told Nancy Dickerson a lede should do? Yes
• What drew you to it? I have a Chinese roommate, of whom I’m very fond. It got me thinking about the pressure she went through just to get here.

I chose Inside Venezuela’s Crumbling Mental Hospitals for my story lede.

“The state-run psychiatric hospital here in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, has long been a forgotten place, filled with forgotten people.”

It continues:

“But with Venezuela suffering from a severe economic crisis, this mental institution has almost no drugs to control the afflictions tormenting its patients.”

It’s a solid lede. It certainly made me want to continue and it set a chilling tone for the rest of the article.

The reason I particularly appreciate this lede is the way it fits in the context of the larger article. In a story that literally details a patient eating another patient’s nose, starving mentally ill patients, and delusional, weeping, schizophrenic grandmothers — it would be cheap and easy journalism to pick the most gruesome detail and make it the lede. The writers (Kohut and Casey) instead fittingly focused on the systemic problems of a government too corrupt to accept foreign aid, and a vulnerable populace society would rather forget than take care of. The story isn’t about a nose being bitten off (though the picture will haunt you for weeks). It’s about the state-run hospitals from hell. It’s not a flashy lede, but it’s a lede that dares you to keep reading, or otherwise confront the uncomfortable truth of your own apathy.

The snow burst through the trees with no warning but a last-second whoosh of sound, a two-story wall of white and Chris Rudolph’s piercing cry: “Avalanche! Elyse!”

This is the lead from the story “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek by John Branch”. It is a scene setter lede, descrbing the scene when avalanche happened.I like lede with action and suspension. I like this lede because it gives me a feel of watching movie. The scene is vivid. Through the author’s description, I can image a pitcture in my head. Also, the lede makes me wonder what happened next to Elyse, one of the main characters in the story.

 

The story that I read is “A Home Invasion, A Torture Session, One Lawyer Nearly Killing Another—The Gruesome November Night in One of Washington’s Wealthiest Suburbs.” This story was about
Andrew Schmuhl breaking into his wife’s ex-boss’ home, interrogating him, and being arresting with nothing on but an adult diaper. The lede is a scene setter lede, reading:

“Sue Duncan was roasting a chicken for dinner when she and her husband heard the doorbell ring. It had been a quiet night. Leo Fisher was sitting on a recliner in the living room, reading. It was 6:15 on November 9, 2014, a cool fall evening in McLean.”

This lede introduces the location and overall tone of the ex-boss’ home that is about to get broken into. It was more of a prayer someone would listen, rather than an exciting statement. The excitement in the story comes after the lede in the following graphs. The lede makes this sort of utopian picture, which makes the reader want to keep reading to see when the chaos is going to occur. It contradicts the headline, which describes a dramatic event.

“The Hillary-for-prison sign outside Mine Lifeline on Main Street was so enormous that it attracted attention, even though its message was so ordinary in Logan County, West Virginia, that the sign seemed festive rather than threatening.” 

This is the lede from a story I chose called “In the Heart of Trump Country” by Larissa MacFarquhar of the New Yorker. The piece examines the lives, culture, and rationales of rural communities in West Virginia that are almost uniformly Trump-supporting.

I chose this piece because I was intrigued by the title, which is both succinct and expressive. We cannot deny that support for presidential candidates is linked with geography and culture (just think about Athens is the small blue dot in a red state), and I was interested to learn about what economic and cultural factors draw people of West Virginia to support Trump.

I believe the lede for this story can be called a scene-setter, as it paints a picture of life in the rural area about which the reporter is writing. Even when the lede is removed from the picture accompanying it, the mental image conjured by that first sentence creates a glimpse of a world unfamiliar to many readers. What has contributed to a hatred of Hillary Clinton so strong that a “Hillary for prison” sign reads as festive?

The lede, for me, did scream “J.C. listen to this.” Perhaps this is getting more political than is appropriate for class purposes, but I will admit for the sake of this blog post that my blood boils at the very mention of Trump. But to learn about his appeal from an article (rather than, say, my grandpa, whom I love dearly but cannot handle discussing politics with), was informative and even humbling.  It is easy to only seek out “journalism” that supports our preconceived ideas and beliefs (especially during election season), but this article represents all the good that can come from taking the time to learn about why others believe what they believe.

“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.

Read the full story here if you enjoy laughing about the ridiculousness of the #Internet or just really, really want to know more about the Internet’s Boyfriend (aka Cumberbatch).