Warning: Do not 'steal the lead'

In the newspaper business, young headline writers always are warned not to "steal the lead." Like most forms of theft, this marks the offender as lazy and morally adrift.

Here's an example straight from the crime lab: A reporter writes a lead (an article's opening paragraph or two) that says, "Big Business increasingly finds itself under fire for poor treatment of elderly workers." Our shifty/lazy copyeditor comes along and tops the story with the following headline: "Big Business Under Fire for Treatment of Elderly."

Every word of the headline comes directly from the reporter's lead. So any impact that might result from the author's carefully chosen words has been deflected by the headline. The reader has an immediate deja vu, having read the same sentence twice. Repetition of just the verb can have the same effect. Take another look at this blog post's headline and lead. Yeech. Give me rewrite!

Online, where stories often are accessed via blurbs (short summaries), the repetition can be compounded. So you see the headline twice, and the lead twice. One click away. Ugly. Boring.

In print or online, I never let my editors steal leads. In many cases, they did not realize they were doing anything wrong -- it just seemed the clearest and most accurate way to summarize the story. (Headlines usually must index the story, true.) Or the headline just wrote itself. (Always be suspicious of easy writing, the ancients said.)

But working solo on a blog, you can steal from yourself all you like, right? Not if you're smart.

A headline gives you one shot at grabbing a reader. The lead gives you another. They should work in conjunction, a whip-smart one-two sales pitch. When a blurb, subhead or photo caption comes into play, there's another opportunity to enchant the reader.

Major newspapers and magazines are good at this -- take a look at how their editors finesse these elements. Learn from the big-leaguers -- and join them.