No, it’s not a typo. The term “lede” refers to the opening shot of a news story, the words and ideas that either capture the reader’s interest or lose him or her forever.
While lede is a journalist’s term of art dating back to the newsrooms of the 1950s and perhaps earlier, it remains tremendously relevant today. In fact, I believe it to be so critical that I named my new company Lede Media.
It should be no surprise that in a world of short attention spans and information overload, capturing a reader’s attention right at the start of a story or post is a necessity. If by the end of the first paragraph or so we haven’t accomplished this, we might as well have not written the rest.
This concept applies equally to other popular media formats.
Video, even the short-form content seen on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts, relies heavily on the “hook” creators use to capture attention. Similar to the news lede, a hook comes at us in the very first seconds. It can be words, images, sounds or even the way a video is edited.
“You won’t believe how good this tastes!”
“This place will blow your mind!”
The hook doesn’t summarize as much as it grabs viewers by the throat and compels them to stop scrolling and watch. It creates intrigue, interest and wonder about what’s to follow. The lede can do this, too. Like the first sentence of this post: “No, it’s not a typo.”
I named Lede Media after this idea to highlight the fact that effective content today — in any media format — must have a strong lede if we want others to consume it. We simply cannot send posts, newsletters and social content to our audiences and assume they will land simply because we sent them.
Even influencers need to hook their viewers. And they’re paid to capture attention.
The first step to creating an effective lede is recognizing we need to create an effective lede. Then, we can spend time with it. Craft it. Come back to it. Edit it. Tighten it up. Trash it if it’s not working and start again. Writers have been doing this across media formats for a long, long time. Even novelists.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” Charles Dickens wrote in 1859 to begin A Tale of Two Cities.
A truly great lede. Fortunately, we don’t have to be as good as Dickens to be effective.
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