I see it in your ledes!

How you start stories reveals volumes about how you think, who you are and what you value.

Why it matters

If there’s a window into your newsroom’s soul — and heart and mind — it’s the character and quality of your anchor ledes.

My grandmother read palms. It started as a charity thing. When the church would hold their annual carnival fundraiser, they’d recruit her to play the fortune teller. The creative imagination she tapped to improvise stories for us as children served her well as a creator of imaginary futures for carnival-goers who presented their hands to her. Apparently, she was a hit and in real demand. And then she quit.

When I asked her about it years later, she was stingy with the details. “I began to see — or maybe intuit — more than I’d bargained for,” was pretty much all she’d say about it. “There was much more there than what was on the surface. And some of it was not easy to see and much better left unsaid.” She told the church to find another fortune teller.

If psychic ability is a genetic thing, I’m pretty sure she didn’t pass that gene along to me. Show me a palm and all I see is a palm. Still, I think about her because that’s the way I feel when I study anchor ledes — especially now that there’s so much being made about the value of context and the importance of authenticity. There’s a lot more there than just the start of another story.

• The language you choose tells me immediately whether you’re performing the news or having a conversation with me about it. When you talk in a way you’d never talk in “real life” — omitting copular and auxiliary verbs, positing everything in the present tense, speaking in headlines instead of sentences — it’s formulaic and it’s clearly a performance.

• The approach you take — the way you set things up — tells me whether your understanding of the story is nuanced or relatively shallow. In other words, are you just describing an event or are you present to the issue that elevates the event to news?

• The detail you include tells me how well you understand the market and the people who live there. Do you talk like an insider? Or are you just decorating a formula with some vocal and facial expression? (That second thing, by the way, is the stuff that AI anchor dreams are made of.)

None of this is to imply or recommend that there’s a one-lede-fits-all template to be mastered. As an industry, we’re already doing the long work of undoing formulaic systems that underthought and oversimplified all sorts of things, including the way stories are set up. We’re better served by embracing complexity.

So sure, sometimes the moment is best served by setting things up simply and directly, with a kind of “smart brevity” (Thank you, Axios, for coining the perfect term for this!) that gets right to the point. But other stories — often the ones where stakes for the community are the highest — can’t be understood or appreciated without more context and depth.

And it’s those conversational, context-driven ledes that teach the rest of us so much about who you are, how you think, and what you value.

Going Deeper

When it comes to mastery of the conversational lede, one frequently cited standout is Next, KUSA’s gutsy presentation of context and reaction featuring anchor Kyle Clark.

Here’s Clark setting up a recent story on public transportation.

Obviously, Clark and his team are doing lots more than simply summarizing the event of the day. They know what the event represents.

By starting there — “A promise may be kept in Colorado, 21 years after it was made.” — they produce a lede that teaches me as much about the anchor as it does about the story to come.

Before he’s 30 seconds in, I know:

• He knows the territory. He’s articulate about the communities involved. He knows the landscape. Literally.

• He knows the story’s history. He’s been following it for years, using the flip chart as a device to underscore what the organization has seen as an issue from the start — the very long horizon on the completion of a project. He’s not a nomad. He’s a local.

• He knows what’s coming. He’s already given thought to how he wants to set it up. Whatever you think about his showmanship, there’s no arguing that Clark knows what he’s talking about.

• He has a sense of humor. This is not a trivial insight. In our research, having a sense of humor has rated consistently as one of the most powerful attributes an anchor can own — primarily because of the way that viewers associate it with other important attributes like being smart and well-informed.

• He has a point of view. It’s editorial, in that he believes that completing the project sooner rather than later is a good thing. But it’s a point of view that suggests he cares about the people and the area he serves. He wants to see a good thing happen.

  Important note: An anchor should always have a point of view. It does not have to be a point of view that takes sides. It can simply be a conviction that the story she’s sharing is important and the conversation around it matters.

• He loves his job. Whether it’s leading a newscast or hitting a baseball or you-name-it, there’s always something especially compelling about watching someone do something they love. You can tell Clark loves the work.

And possibly most important of all, I know how to listen to everything that follows.

How you start a story teaches viewers how to value what follows.

Shortly after the pandemic, we asked a national audience of 1,000 viewers to look at a couple of ledes and additional information related to a single story. We were interested in how language and delivery might impact how viewers thought about the importance of the story.

The story was about the last-minute cancellation of hybrid learning classes in a Philadelphia suburb.

Here are the clips we tested:

500 viewers saw one version of the story and 500 saw the other version. After watching, we asked them to rate the story’s importance and to explain their rating. The explanations literally echoed the language in the ledes they’d heard.

Here are the graphics detailing those descriptions.

People who saw the first version said the story was important because it was about Covid in school. People who saw the second version said the story was important because of its effect on children.

What viewers said they valued literally echoed the language of the lede they’d heard.

In a world where it’s never been more important to work in ways that people will value enough to come back for more, how you finish may depend on how you start. Literally. Craft your ledes formulaically and unimaginatively, and you seed a formulaic and unimaginative response from the people you serve.

Craft your ledes in ways that inspire and animate you, and you raise your chances of animating and inspiring your viewers as well.

That’s a big deal. The future could depend on it.

And it’s so obvious, I didn’t need to be psychic to figure it out.

Next time: News isn’t dying. Newscasts are.

If viewers really felt they needed you, they’d find a way to watch you. Daily essentials like weather and traffic are now easily acquired elsewhere. Catastrophes big enough to drive people to local newscasts in meaningful numbers are few and far between. What’s left to do that viewers will value so much they want to keep you in their lives?