Bloomberg looks at better leads to engage readers

Bill Grueskin, the executive editor of training at Bloomberg News, sent out a memo to the editorial staff on Monday about how the news organization’s lead writing can be used to better engage its audiences.

Here is an excerpt:

We usually think of a lead as the first paragraph of the story. Occasionally, one paragraph doesn’t do the job. Here are a few recent examples:

There’s the Vladimir Putin who patted President Barack Obama on the back, and who wrapped a shawl around the wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping to protect her from the cold.

And then there’s the Putin who greeted his hosts at this weekend’s summit of global leaders in Brisbane by parking warships off the Australian coast. This after his air force announced bomber sorties as far as the Gulf of Mexico and Russian troops entered Ukraine, according to NATO.

Janet Yellen’s appointment as Federal Reserve chair this year was hailed as another step toward gender equality. How about a central bank where women outnumber men?

This is the Bank of Thailand, which runs monetary policy in Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy and has 31 women among its 60 top executives.

In Rostov-on-Don, a Russian port city of 1.1 million people just east of the Ukrainian border, signs of the fallout from the ruble’s collapse are everywhere.

There’s the 27-year-old entrepreneur whose storage facility is packed to the ceiling with imported Spanish tiles that his clients can’t afford anymore. There’s the accountant who had a front tooth pulled, only to realize she didn’t have enough money to pay for the imported implant needed to fill the gap. And there’s the interior designer who’s resigned herself to getting no year-end bonus after watching sales plunge at the European furniture store she works in.

Two-paragraph leads work best for non-deadline stories that require context and nuance.

In the first example, Michael Heath deftly portrays the duality of Putin’s strategy by using the first paragraph to set up the Russian leader’s conciliatory moves and then contrasts those actions with his military tactics.

In the third example, Elena Popina brings the reader to Rostov-on-Don in the first graf, then provides vivid examples of three people suffering economic duress. Imagine how much less effective the story would have been had it started with a typical anecdotal lead about, say, the orally challenged accountant.

We don’t want to overuse this technique. It rarely works on breaking-news stories. Even features often benefit from a direct approach. But when we have a story that’s particularly complex or anecdote-rich, the two-paragraph lead can be the way to go.

A Bloomberg News spokeswoman emphasizes that the company is not moving away from its vaunted four-paragraph lead structure that is used with many of its breaking news stories.