Best ledes

This isn't the lede, just part of the story.

With that, what ARE your favorite ledes?

Who writes the best ledes these days?

 

Edna Buchanan on the guy shot while trying to stick up a chicken place in protest of its slow service: “(Name) died hungry.”

Don’t know author. Story about a condemned man’s final hours: “(Name) received a phone call from his girlfriend that warmed his heart and 10,000 volts of electricity that stopped it.”

 

If Edna had written that lede ...

 

Technical point: Voltage isn’t what kills - it’s the resulting current flow.

I know of stories where people have been killed and the potential difference was less than five volts.

Current is what disrupts the heartbeat.

 

Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.



John Lardner
True Magazine
1954

 

Wow 3 "was" in the sentence.

And they say to avoid being passive.

 

In the game-story category ... Gene Wojciechowski, L.A. Times, 1991:


TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Chunks of broken ceiling tile and thick swatches of insulation, the products of a Miami victory celebration gone berserk, littered the floor of the visitors’ locker room.

Kids.

Meanwhile, in the near-silent Florida State locker room, where the late-great No. 1-ranked Seminoles resided, the damage was more severe. There were broken hearts, broken dreams and the cold realization, as cold as the thought of Saturday’s 17-16 loss to the Hurricanes, that yet another precious national title chance had slipped away.

 

For the longest time, I thought "Gentlemen, start your coffins!" was the lead to a Jim Murray column.

But it was just a line deep in the column. . . . that also was appropriated for the headline.

Jim Murray, 'Gentlemen, Start Your Coffins!'

 

What's worse, hearing fingernails on a chalkboard or watching Hank Gathers shoot a free throw?

 

This one is usually attributed to the late Frank McGhee of the Daily Mirror. It was his advance on the eve of the 1966 World Cup final between England and (then) West Germany: "If, on the morrow, the Germans beat us at our national game, we'd do well to remember that, twice this century, we have beaten them at theirs."

 

The light moment actually has a precedent in fact. It reminded anyone who has read Dan Jenkins over the years of his "Best Lead Ever Written on a Golf Story." According to Jenkins, Leonard Crawley of the London Daily Telegraph once typed: "Despite the abominable handling of the press luggage at the Zurich airport, the Swiss Open managed to get of to a rather decent start yesterday."

 

The entire top of Kathryn Schulz's earthquake story is ridiculously good, but here's the lede:

When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.

Yeah, you're gonna keep reading.

The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest