Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Stop press!

What rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches toward the 1A budget meeting to croak its unholy demand: "Hey, let's lead the paper with the Burger King story!"
 

While we're on the subject, here's a hed-writing rule: Use the deck to expand on the main hed, not to echo it. You can go deeper into a topic (specifying what "new look" would mean, for example) or broader (particularly in politics, where you might let the deck contradict an assertion in the main hed). But avoid repeating ideas or words. Yes, that means you don't say "is going for a new look" in the deck to complement "goes for new look" in the main hed.

It could always be worse. There's a basketball column on the front page, and we could have led with that.

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