This week we will learn about profile stories, which use a very different method of writing leads.
When you write a hard news story, or a short profile, you use the inverted pyramid form, which puts the basic stories at the top.
When you write a longer profile, you use a story or stories about your subject's life as a way of introducing them. You still give us the who, what, when, where, why and how lead paragraph or graf, but it is delayed. This is what is called a buried lede in journalism. That paragraph, which comes in sentence and/or paragraph one, will wait until paragraph six, seven or eight in a profile.
Here is such a story, on the actress Mayim Bialik, a star of the CBS Show "the Big Bang Theory":
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/fashion/from-blossom-to-amy-but-still-always-mayim.html?pagewanted=all
Where is the lead in her story?
What is in paragraph one?
in paragraph two?
in Paragraph three?
For each of these stories, write the title, the paragraph where the lead occurs, and write out the lead sentence.
Do the same for this story on a famous author:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/magazine/eat-pray-love-get-rich-write-a-novel-no-one-expects.html?ref=magazine
When you write a hard news story, or a short profile, you use the inverted pyramid form, which puts the basic stories at the top.
When you write a longer profile, you use a story or stories about your subject's life as a way of introducing them. You still give us the who, what, when, where, why and how lead paragraph or graf, but it is delayed. This is what is called a buried lede in journalism. That paragraph, which comes in sentence and/or paragraph one, will wait until paragraph six, seven or eight in a profile.
Here is such a story, on the actress Mayim Bialik, a star of the CBS Show "the Big Bang Theory":
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/fashion/from-blossom-to-amy-but-still-always-mayim.html?pagewanted=all
Where is the lead in her story?
What is in paragraph one?
in paragraph two?
in Paragraph three?
For each of these stories, write the title, the paragraph where the lead occurs, and write out the lead sentence.
Do the same for this story on a famous author:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/magazine/eat-pray-love-get-rich-write-a-novel-no-one-expects.html?ref=magazine