Worst lede ever

Fixed.

 

Saw one in the past year or so that said...

"All Team A had to do was play well enough to win."

Then spun off into mindless drivel about how that team did NOT play well enough to win.

 

Two examples ...

We had a sportswriter on a Division I beat who has since left the business who constantly would write ledes similar to this: "School X dominated School Y xx-x in front of a nationally televised audience."

And we had another one who, after being promoted from preps to assume the previously mentioned writer's beat, was struggling mightily ... bad stories, missing deadlines covering Division I-A football games, missing news, etc. Essentially, after about six games, our editor told him this was the week to nail it or he was going back to preps. Do or die.

Well, he nailed it and was at least sufficient for the rest of the season before also leaving the business the next spring. But, while searching the system for a story he was supposed to have turned in and didn't, I came across a file he had saved on the system. It was about 12 or 13 ledes he hadwritten for his do-or-die game, all beforehand, without any idea how the game would turn out.

And every one sucked.

 

Great story, Chief. Give the guy credit for trying -- at least in his own feeble way.

I knew a well-traveled freelancer who would steal ledes from the big local paper and change the names and use them in the medium-size paper 60 miles away.

If he though Reporter X had a good lede on a blowout NBA game, he would save it and swap names and maybe and adjective and use it on his high school game.

 

That is some audience if it deserves to be televised.

 

I had a reporter at my college paper try to turn in a poem for the lede. I shit you not. I wish I could remember it. The sad thing is, she wrote it with help from one of the top journalism profs at the school. I was a copy editor at the time and I slashed the fuck out of the lede. She was pissed.
She's since improved. She's a suburban bureau editor at a high profile paper.

 

I know what you mean. But the lede I was going to use never even made it to print. It's the audacity of the idea that pissed off the editor and made him fire me.

 

bump

 

RB John Public could have carried for a lot of yards for Soandso County High, but he drowned during the flood over the summer.

That was the lede. One of the three worst.