Awful Halloween leads

I wrote this one last week:

Podunk had only beaten Team B once in the last eight years and it was a game with big playoff implications. Team B missed a two-point try that would have tied it with 30 seconds left, recovered an onside kick and then missed a field goal at the gun.
Is it the best lede ever? No. Is it going to be in BASW? No.
Was this the only Halloween lede I wrote this year? Yes.
Did I crank this story out and make deadline? Yes.
Was the rest of the story riddled with Halloween cliches? No.
Am I going to write 200 other stories this year? Yes.
Are most of the ledes going to be serious and factual? Yes.
So I'll forgive myself for one or two cheesy ones here and there.

 

My, aren't you an impassioned koala.

The lede makes sense in context with the remainder of the story, and I'm sure my editor had much better things to do when I sent that in at 11:15 on our 11:30 drop dead deadline. For some reason a blowout took about four hours to be completed. Oh yeah, I remember the reason, it was the 35 minute halftime.

 

Oh, I'm definitely not proud of it. I took my editors joking decree as a challenge, and now I won't be using a Holiday-themed lede again.

 

So you took advantage of being tight to deadline to slip through a cliche-ridden lede?
I'm all for having some fun with your writing, even if it means being a little cheesy once in a while, but at least make sure it works and don't game the system.

 

Nope, I would have done it anyway. It just didn't work.

 

This is why most writers never improve.

 

You can easily tell the strength of a section by the ledes for stories written on or near holidays.

 

I think journalists are way more bothered by holiday ledes than the people for whom they're writing.

Crappy Halloween ledes suck, because crappy ledes suck. But Grantland Rice isn't going to give you a golden pass for the press box in Heaven if you stand against making a nod to the holiday in your gamer.

 

Aka the "no one but us will notice" cover. Used to justify many things, some of which are more horrible than holiday ledes.

 

Holiday ledes are the type of thing you'd see in a high school or college paper. That's the biggest reason I have a problem with them. There's a point in every young journalist's life when you just have to learn to let them go.

It's possible to write a soft lede without making it look like amateur hour in the newsroom.

 

I've often said this, if Grantland Rice turned in some of his most famous ledes at a lot of newsrooms in 2015 there's a large number of editors who would break him in two.
There's room for creativity within the framework of your standard story structure. Just make sure it's actually creative and not cliche-ridden nonsense.