[Ipg-smz] A question for everyone, particularly Esther Schindler

[Dan Rosenbaum]

This is not all that unusual at big papers and big stories. Big-city tabloid have reporters and rewrite men. The latter go out and get the story and the color; the former write what you read in the paper. It used to be even more true in the newsweeklies. You needed to be a -very- senior reporter before your own words would show up in print. 

I was a quarter of the news-side UPI team that covered the 52 hostages coming home from Iran in 1981. I phoned headquarters once the buses crossed into West Point and started to dictate my lead, and was told, “Don’t worry about the lead. We already wrote it. It’s on the wire. Just give us the color. “

--
Dan Rosenbaum
Typed on the run; please excuse typos and brevity. 
1-347-658-5855

> On Feb 7, 2019, at 6:57 PM, Tom Geller <tom at tgeller.com> wrote:
> 
> Oh, I have a good one about deleted ledes. (Getting deleded?)
> 
> For my 2013 Lynda.com video course "Writing Articles" (https://www.linkedin.com/learning/writing-articles), I (of course) wrote a dummy article to study. Then in a video that shows how to construct an article, I say:
> 
> "Then after everything else is done, go back and revisit that first paragraph to make it even stronger. One common trick is to simply delete that first sentence and then see if it's reads any better. A lot of writers, including me, need a sentence or two to get into the swing of things."
> 
> Sounds good, right? Except that the producers said, "O.K., do that. Delete the first sentence." I... hadn't planned for that. Luckily, the piece still worked without it. I schooled myself!
> 
> ---
> Tom Geller  *  Writer & Video/journalist  *  http://tomgeller.com
>        Rotterdam, The Netherlands, +31 (0)6 87071468
>             Oberlin, Ohio  *  +1-415-317-1805
> 
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