Burying the Lede
Before I get to today’s entry, a note on the subject line: Many people have asked me and other journalist friends why we spell “lead” as “lede” (not to mention “head” as “hed” and “deck” as “dek”).
Based on what I know – which, admittedly, is limited — this is because when laying out a page, a dummy line of text with a proper word like “lead” in it might be left as is, whereas the deliberately misspelled “lede” will jump out at an editor, who will then replace it with proper text.
If I am rong pleez let mee no.
Anycrazybloggerhow, “burying the lede,” of course, refers to what we’re not supposed to do as journalists. We’re supposed to put the big news up front (evidently, these days we’re also supposed to put the big ads up front, and as far as I’m concerned, that interferes with the news).
However, lede-burying doesn’t always happen because a journalist writes poorly. Sometimes it happens because a source deliberately skims over the important stuff. Sometimes it happens simply because a reader thinks that the later information is more compelling — and that’s my point today.
The Washington Post ran a piece about reading in its Style section today. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, prose-fiction reading is on the rise, showing a leap from 46.7% to 50.2% from 2002 to 2008. That is terrific, although alas — that increase isn’t from people sitting around musing over Albee or Waugh. It’s from young people reading books like Harry Potter and Twilight.
That’s fine as it goes; I’d never discourage any person, especially a young person, from reading anything. Unfortunately, IMHO, the real lede of this article is here:
“The percentage of American adults who report reading any book not required for work or school during the previous year is still declining. It fell from 56.6 percent in 2002 to 54.3 percent in 2008.”
Now, if those “young people” grow up and keep reading, maybe they’ll close this gap. But the reason this is the lede, to me, is that if the current crop of adults continues to shun books in favor of reality shows, Internet activity, and running errands (life is complicated), I’m afraid that the loss in book sales will further weaken the already weak publishing industry.
What do you think?
on January 12th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
I started buying books for my grandson from day one. He’s 5 now and so far, he loves books. He also sees grandma reading and writing all the time, so let’s hope it’s a good example that he will carry on as he grows up!
on January 12th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
LuAnn, I’m sure you and your grandson also go to the library — I want to point out that when I talk about buying books, I include library sales in there. Libraries rock, and librarians rule — I can’t imagine what my life would have been like throughout childhood and adolescence without a great, accessible public library.
on January 15th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
I am thrilled that the Harry Potter series and Twilight series are out there to engage young adult readers in stories that take them out of themselves and transport them to other worlds, even if the books aren’t exactly considered “art”. They seem to be competing quite well against TV, iPods, videos and internet surfing, all of which don’t require long attention spans.
And I think there lies the crux of the problem. We live in a society which has so many outlets to self-amuse which also require but a minumum of concerted attention. We multitask like crazy to maximize what we can do in our sparse spare time. Who has time to read? We even multitask “reading” with books on tape or CD while driving or working out. I’ll bet most people do the bulk of their reading while on vacation, when there is finally time to sit down and unwind, but I’ll bet they are choosing selections that don’t require much deep thinking: “beach reads” for example.
Querry: Do the statistics on the decline of adults reading cited above represent the act of acutal ly sitting down with a book, or does it also include listening to audio books? If it is the latter, then we are really in trouble.
on April 21st, 2009 at 6:49 pm
[...] quite common for journalists to “bury the lede” — that is, to downplay the real news and stick it in the far recesses of an article. [...]
on May 6th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
A recent article in Nation used “lede” five times, my first encounter with the word. I am 80 years old, BA in English, M.Div in theology. If you want to encourage reading, less esoterica and more direct, active voice sentences.
on November 19th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Every old-time newspaper guy know that lede is spelled that way to distinguish it from lead in the pre-computerized days when type was set in hot lead.
And burying the lede in a feature story often means backing into it with uninteresting stuff: not grabbing the reader’s attention strongly enough.