Enlivening a Feature Lead

Enlivening a Feature Lead

The lead of any story may determine whether a reader will continue to read the story. The feature lead, it seems to me, is particularly important in establishing the reader's interest.

A General Lead
There is nothing wrong with writing a general lead that simply states the subject or describes the theme of the story. You will find plenty of them in good newspapers. Suppose, for example, you were writing a story about Westfield State students who suffer from serious depression. You might write a lead that went something like this: A substantial number of Westfield State College students struggle with serious, even debilitating, depression, according to campus counselors.

A Particular Lead
Some reporters and editors look at that lead and ask, "Can we do better?" Is there another way of getting readers interested in a story about students suffering from depression? One way is to animate the lead. What do I mean? One can inject flesh-and-blood into the lead, using a person to represent a group of people who are the subject of the story. To put it another way, perhaps we can tell a little story about a person. We think it's easier for readers to get interested in stories about people than in abstractions or general ideas. Here's how a personalized lead might go:
Mary Doe, a junior at Westfield State College, says she knew something was wrong when she couldn't get interested in celebrating Christmas.
"I had always been a person who loved everything about Christmas," said Doe, 20, who lives in Goshen, Mass.
"Last December, I was totally wasted. I couldn't study for exams. I wouldn't answer the phone when my friends or my family called. I couldn't start the papers I had to finish for my courses. All I did was sleep and watch television."
Doe said her roommate eventually persuaded her to see someone at the Counseling Center on campus.
"They diagnosed me as suffering from depression," Doe said, "and they referred me to a psychiatrist, who prescribed antidepressants. It was tough making it through exams, but by Christmas I was functioning again."
Doe is one of many students, according to Westfield State's mental health counselors, who suffer from depression.
So the idea in its simplest form: take an individual to stand for a group, a class of people, a situation involving many people, places, or things. The individual is not always a person. Suppose you're writing a piece on a new kind of coffee shop that has sprung up in northeastern cities. Your lead might focus on ONE of those shops.
People who teach journalism call that kind of lead a Wall Street Journal lead because for many years the WSJ has used it, especially in the trend stories in runs in the lefthand and righthand columns on the front.
This kind of lead is sometimes called a lead block. The block might contain two, three, perhaps, in some instances, as many as five or six paragraphs. The block is followed by what some journalism books call "the nut graph," the paragraph that tells the reader what this story is about. I call that graph "the turn," recognizing that in that paragraph the writer turns from the individual to the group, class, etc.
SO. How would you handle this question if you got it on our test? How would you go about writing a Wall Street Journal lead on a feature story about an apparent trend: More and more Westfield State College students are spending spring break at home with their families and friends? (You may either describe what you would do or try your hand at writing the lead.)