Example of how a good lead is written | Excerpt from Made To Stick

Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the

New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher.

Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalists gets

the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why.

As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron's

teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: "Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that

the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund 'Pat' Brown."

The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: "Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento . . . blah, blah, blah."

The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then

he laid them aside and paused for a moment.

Finally, he said, "The lead to the story is 'There will be no school

next Thursday.'"

"It was a breathtaking moment," Ephron recalls. "In that instant I

realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn't enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant.

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