Broadcast News and Writing Stylebook, 5th Edition

CHAPTER 7
	Leads and Endings

The broadcast lead must capture the interest and attention of the audience. It may announce important developments; it may summarize complicated data; it may scream in joy, cry in pain or wonder in astonishment. But whatever it does and—within reason—however it does it, the lead must grab hold of the audience.

Newspaper’s traditional inverted pyramid lead attempts to answer, in abbreviated form, most of the basic journalistic questions of a story: the who, what, where and when (and sometimes even why and how).

The inverted pyramid style has no place in broadcast journalism, and the broadcast lead has no real ...