I was watching Chris Hayes, I think, when I saw these words pop across the screen. I was startled. I have of course heard the phrase before, but I realized I must not have seen it spelled out before, because I had always assumed it was spelled "burying the lead". When coming across it in the past, I'd taken it to mean something like losing the main point of a newspaper story in the less important text below, but, shaken by this unfamiliar spelling, I wondered if I had gotten more wrong than simply that.
Hence, an investigation...
***
Well, first of all, both spellings are correct. I was surprised to learn that lede is not some old Anglo-Saxon variant spelling, as I'd half suspected. In fact, it is a very modern variant, with its first appearance in print not being until 1965. The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests the possibility that it may have become part of the jargon to avoid confusion with the word for the element lead, and particularly the molten lead of typesetting machines. I don't know--seems a little late in the day for that. I liked the more humorous comment of someone over on the Merriam Webster site, who suggests that some journalist brought it into existence when their 'a' key broke.
I was looking around for some examples of burying the lede when it occurred to me that this whole blog could be taken as a prime example. I realized this after reading a piece of advice on writing press releases. In it, the writer counseled the press release writer not to start with a chatty forward but to cut to the chase--do you think people want to spend their lives reading press releases that are any longer than they have to be? And what about blogs?
Here's a diagram of how a journalist would write a story:
Hence, an investigation...
***
Well, first of all, both spellings are correct. I was surprised to learn that lede is not some old Anglo-Saxon variant spelling, as I'd half suspected. In fact, it is a very modern variant, with its first appearance in print not being until 1965. The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests the possibility that it may have become part of the jargon to avoid confusion with the word for the element lead, and particularly the molten lead of typesetting machines. I don't know--seems a little late in the day for that. I liked the more humorous comment of someone over on the Merriam Webster site, who suggests that some journalist brought it into existence when their 'a' key broke.
I was looking around for some examples of burying the lede when it occurred to me that this whole blog could be taken as a prime example. I realized this after reading a piece of advice on writing press releases. In it, the writer counseled the press release writer not to start with a chatty forward but to cut to the chase--do you think people want to spend their lives reading press releases that are any longer than they have to be? And what about blogs?
Here's a diagram of how a journalist would write a story:
And you could say that that's pretty much the opposite of how I write this blog, if indeed, I could be said to have a plan at all. Good thing I never pretended to be a journalist, or actually to be efficient at anything. I'm not blogging to "build a platform" or gain readership or anything else. I'd say I write this for my own edification, but considering how little I retain of all this, it might be better to say that I write it for my own amusement.
If you, on the other hand, do want readers of your blog to pick up specific content, you might read this Slate piece by Farhad Manjoo from last year, on how much online readers do actually read of articles. It will be a good incentive to get to the point.
As is the way of these things, I have now seen "lead" written as "lede" twice since starting this. Ledes, apparently, are everywhere.
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Or maybe it's "lede" because the newspapers in question have junked their copy desks.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I am inclined to believe that suggestion that "lede" is so spelled to avoid confusion with "lead."
Burying the lede ... I'll write a book, or at least a long blog post, about that some day.
Yes, I think it may well be that it's to avoid confusion--my only question is, why did it take them till 1976 to figure it out?
ReplyDeleteI am sure your book or article would be interesting. After looking at a few examples, it's not as easy to figure out what the lede is as it might seem.
I can recall that term from the late 1970s. This does not mean it originated then, but that's when I started working on my college newspaper.
ReplyDeleteIt is said that the practice originated in order to reduce the possibility of important matter being trimmed out of the story on the composing-room floor. But then some writers started getting art and delaying their ledes, and-- but I will save the rest for my thinly veiled roman a clef.
I just edited this because for some reason I had gotten the idea that lede's first appearance in print was 1976, but it was actually 1965. So it was probably pretty old hat by the time you were in school.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that the more conventional speling of "lead" in journalism only appeared in print as recently as 1912, although it is of course a much older word in other contexts. The Online Etymology Dictionary has Dr. Johnson referring to it as a "low, despicable word", which is not surprising in that it came to journalism through gambling and then theater. And went on to that low if thriving enterprise, jazz.
I should see if my abridged edition of Dr. Johnson's dictionary included "lede." I can understand how the word in its current sense might strike him as low, as an unseemly abbreviation. I generally don't like adjectives that stand alone in place of the nouns they modify. But I've been living with this one for a long time.
ReplyDeleteIt might. There is another unconnected lede which means a man, a nation, or a people. But that is not the word that Johnson is referring to here.
ReplyDeleteYou had me at "lede."
ReplyDeleteVery odd. I keep trying to comment, hitting publish or preview, and the comment just disappears.
ReplyDeleteObviously it's working now. The intended comment:
ReplyDeleteI come to bury the lede, not to praise him.
Great, Kathleen, they had me at lede too.
ReplyDeleteNice one, Peter. Yes, I've been noticing that in my email sometimes an earlier remark arrives after a later one, although the time on each is correct.
ReplyDeleteA crusty but beloved former editor at my newspaper once said that he was so old that, "I can remember when we had ledes instead of nut grafs."
ReplyDeleteThis is a downer. I really want "lede" to be some sort of Hobbitspeak or Chaucerian/Spenserian torture for high school English classes.
ReplyDeleteDon't be downcast. There is a Middle English lede, but it means man, people or folk. And isn't that a better Middle English use for it.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to stay down, though, consider that there is apparently a journalistic word called hed, for headline.
Hed, nu, graf, and TK are all part of journalism, though the last only in written form.
ReplyDeletenu = new
graf = paragraph
TK = to come
You do have to wonder why, in this shorthand era, these aren't the new normal. Well, I don't text or tweet much (or at all), so maybe they are. I mean, may b they R.
ReplyDeleteSecond try:
ReplyDeleteWhy should there be a new anything surrounding a morbid medium? I'm surprised that a newspaper term generated even a blog post.
Peter, I'm surprised that you're surprised that anything might generate a blog post here. Or, well, anywhere...
ReplyDeleteWell, yes, But someone used the expression, which triggered your post, and the post has generated a bit of a discussion. I suspect that out of nostalgia or for other reasons, newspapers will enjoy an kind of afterlife in American culture. I expect this will last at least until the last former newspaperman who deserted a sinking ship for a job at a journalism school, and who hence has a vested interested in insisting that journalism has a future, retires or dies.
ReplyDeleteI wonder about many things that are fading out of the landscape--newspapers, bookstores, cafes as places where people discuss things rather than just bring their devices, downtowns in general, to name but a few. I read Jonathan Franzen's The Kraus Project recently, where he says in passing that blogs can't replace journalism. That said, I don't think TV news can replace journalism either, but to some extent it did.
ReplyDeleteI used to have more of an interest in bookstores thriving, but the problem that I have with them, as with many of these entities is that the brunt of the idealistic project is born by the work force. The business model doesn't include decent wages for the work force, or at least in my experience it doesn't. And from what I could see of the financing, can't. I don't know how it is in these other valuable enterprises, but I really think it's madness to expect people to stay in unworkable business models. Better to call it volunteer labor outright, and I don't mean that cynically.
Of course blogs can't replace journalism. Of course TV can't replace journalism. But who says anything has to replace it? Who says, in other words, that things must get better all the time?
ReplyDeleteAnd, perhaps, of course bookstores can no longer thrive. But, who says things must get better all the time, in every respect? The best we can hope for, I think, is that everyone will eventually recognize how utterly unreliable the Internet as a source of information. How we will then fulfill our need to communicate and exchange news, who knows?
I don't think it's the medium's problem. I think that the problem is that there is no editorial oversight, which means that there is no authority. And basically that means that you have to pay people edit and to write subjecting themselves to editing. Whether anyone values clarity and authority enough for this to happen is another question. Meanwhile, we get by.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteOh, we'll get by, all right, but in what sort of intellectual, cultural, social state, who knows?
ReplyDeleteI have heard it said that the days of the writer who could make a living writing are done. I think David Byrne casts doubt on the possibility of a future in which people can make money playing music. We have the Internet to think for this, for heaping create a world in which transmission is all, and the quality of what is transmitted means nothing. I think one could trace a plausible decline of some kind by looking at our culture through stages of decline called successive ages: the Age of Knowledge, the Age of Information, and the Age of Content.
ReplyDeleteI think we are in some sort of intermediary stage. If people tire of creating content for free to feed all this it stops, but who knows right now how any of it will pan out?.
ReplyDeleteNobody knows, of course. Meanwhile, in a refreshing change from the uncritical techno-boosterism in which almost all of us are complicit, here's a bit from a Booklist Online Read Alert today:
ReplyDelete"Our sustained love affair with consumerism is, of course, the biggest threat to sustainability there is. We'll camp overnight outside the Apple Store to get the latest iPhone, iPad, or iPromise of a better life—but we won't cross the room to lower the thermostat.
"When we hold these things in our hands, we don't see the sweatshop that produced them, the e-waste they become, or the warehouses of servers humming away, burning electricity so we can stave off boredom with funny videos. It feels better to have something than to not have it;"