WSJ writing king Newman tells how he did it

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Barry Newman, who wrote more than 400 A-head front page stories for the paper, has written a book called “News to Me” about his writing and reporting style.

The Guardian has posted an excerpt. Here’s part of it:

This is the point: A lede should lead directly to the story underneath it. Its purpose, whether it concerns lead, small steel mills, or carrots, is to charm readers into reading paragraph two. Dozens of other stories encircle every story in a newspaper, every newspaper is encircled by magazines and books, and they’re all engulfed by the internet’s torrent of clickbait. When an eye lands on a lede that reads like the first page of a novel, in my opinion, the eye loses patience. But Twitter isn’t entirely to blame, and here’s proof: “Copy readers in the old days used to insist that all the facts in the story be bunched together in the opening paragraph. This never made for a very moving chronicle, but at least you got the idea of what was going on.” Robert Benchley wrote that—in 1925—warning of a menace to American journalism: The “pretty belief” that “every reporter is potentially master of the short story…”

To read more, go here.