The use of leads and Short reports is intended to wet the appetite of the consumer. The person is presented who, what, when, where in a quick orderly fashion. This is effective because if they are truly interested the reader will later look in to finding out the why or how of the story. Short reports are organized in different ways depending on the medium. Broadcast or web bulletins are 1-2 sentence, they are reserved for urgent situations like weather emergencies. E-mail alerts are another way news outlets keep users up to date. You can also tailor the alerts to subjects that interest you like stocks or fantasy sports. Yes now surfing the internet can an even lazier activity. Short reports differ from leads in that leads are written in the past tense. It is used to draw the reader into the article. There is not just a quick update on breaking news like short reports tend to be.
I found an example of a summary lead on the New York Times website. It read “The engineer of the commuter train that crashed into a freight train in California on Friday,
killing 25, is said to have been exchanging text messages before the accident.” (New York Times) this is a summary lead because it is first off in past tense, it’s very specific mentioning all the details of the story before the newest addition about the conductor text messaging. It’s also avoided being wordy and speaks to the reader because of the loss of life being mentioned.
The Short report example I found was “In one of the most dramatic days in Wall Street history, Lehman Brothers said it will file for Chapter 11 b
ankruptcy, while Merrill Lynch agreed to sell itself to Bank of America for about $50 billion.” This is out there displaying the need to know facts in an orderly and efficient manner. You got who, what, when and where. And if they hooked you, you jump on board double click and find out the why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/us/15crash.html?hp
1 comment:
Good observation that the why is often located lower in the story. I plan to ask you to talk about that in class. Please stay after so we can review how to create in-text links. That way, you won't have long URLs gunking up your writing.
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