Finding Feature Leads

We are going to look at some examples of feature leads today in the hopes that you will become more comfortable with the various strategies so you have them as options for when you write your feature story.

We are going to go over the rest of the list on the UIL packets we started on Thursday, but if you end up doing this assignment outside of class for some reason, you can access the same list by clicking this link.

PART ONE: Read each feature lede below and then identify what type of feature lede it illustrates.

PART TWO: Visit these two sites (Nieman StoryBoard Notable Narratives and/or Pulitzer Prize Feature Winners) and see how many of the different types of feature ledes you can find. You have until the end of the class period. The one who finds the highest number of ledes from the list wins.  You get a 100 percent if you find five, a 95 if you find three, a 90 if you find two, and an 85 if you find only one.  (Who knows? Maybe we'll find some great features to read as a class).

1. "When a man bites another human being's ear, he should be banned from boxing for life," Evander Holyfield said, pressing a handkerchief against the side of his bloodied head.

2. St. John's Church survived the 1868 fire that destroyed most of Bloomington, and it weathered firebombs thrown in anger during the sixties. But it crumbled last night under the weight of snow from yesterday's freak storm.

3. SILVER SUMMIT, Utah -- He sat in his chambers, unprepared for this. "Just giving you a heads up," his court administrator was saying. "Paul Wayment hasn't reported in yet. They can't find him." Judge Robert Hilder felt uneasy. Wayment was supposed to start his jail sentence this morning.

4. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In a dormitory lobby, under harsh fluorescent lights, there is a glimpse of the future: A throng of promising minority high schoolers, chatting and laughing, happy and confident.

5. HATTIESBURG, Miss., Aug. 10 -- Oseola McCarty spent a lifetime making other people look nice. Day after day, for most of her 87 years, she took in bundles of dirty clothes and made them clean and neat for parties she never attended, weddings to which she was never invited, graduations she never saw.

6. For many cellular phones are all talk.

But at NTT DoCoMo—Japan’s leading mobile communications operator—company employees are proving that the cellular phone can be much, much more.

7. Could Bill Gates still have the last laugh? Microsoft’s boss reportedly boasted to Intel employees back in 1995 that “this antitrust thing will blow over.”  Those words have echoed hollowly on each of the Judgment Day’s since, as Microsoft steadily descended into Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s three circles of hell-branded a monopoly, found in violation of antitrust law, and, finally, last week, ordered to perform self-dismemberment.  But Gates has at least one, and more likely two, lives left in this game—one if the U.S. Supreme Court takes the case immediately, as the Justice Department and Judge Jackson want, and two if the high court declines to hear the case until it goes through the U.S. Court of Appeals.  Maybe—just maybe—it will blow over yet.

8. In the cold hours of a winter morning, Dr. Thomas Barbee Ducker, University Hospital’s senior brain surgeon, rises before dawn.  His wife serves him waffles but no coffee.  Coffee makes his hands shake.

Downtown, on the 12th floor of the hospital, Edna Kelly’s husband tells her goodbye.

For 57 years Mrs. Kelly shared her skull with the monster.  No more.  Today she is frightened but determined.

It is 6:30 a.m.

9. On a refrigerated, colorless Saturday morning in the no-McDonald's town of Walnut, Ill., Kenny Wilcoxen walked along the street carrying the letter he had waited for his whole life, the one that meant that after 20 years he was finally going to ref the state high school football finals. On the other side of the letter, written neatly in blue ink, was his suicide note.  (This one has two answers because it combines two approaches.)

10. "To Whom it May Concern: If this letter has been opened and is being read, it is because I have been seriously injured or killed by my son, Sky Walker."

No one knows for sure when Trudy Steuernagel wrote that letter.

She read it to her ex-husband, Scott Walker, in the spring of 2008, when their autistic son, Sky, had grown so violent she sometimes had to barricade herself in a closet.

By then, Trudy's life had begun to feel a lot like that closet. Small. Dark. Isolated. Her ex-husband was gone, living in Wisconsin with his new wife and stepson. Many of her friends were gone, too, lost to the demands she faced caring for Sky.

Sky remained. But in a way, Sky was gone, too. Over the years, he had slipped away from her, retreating into the shadows of autism. The smart little boy who stole hearts with his smiles and hugs had disappeared. Left behind was a 200-pound teenager who overwhelmed her with his constant needs and his unpredictable, terrible anger.

Trudy spent her days teaching political science at Kent State University, where she was a popular professor. She went home to Sky and long evenings of his ever more rigid routines, girding herself for his next meltdown, and hoping the next medication would bring Sky back.

That spring, as Sky's violence increased, Trudy told Scott she had locked the letter in her home safe, in case the worst happened. Less than a year later, it did.

On Jan. 29, 2009, sheriff's deputies found Trudy on the floor of her kitchen, unconscious and struggling to breathe. They found Sky in the basement, blood on his pajamas and feet.

The next day, Trudy's brother, Bill Steuernagel, found the safe in Trudy's closet. The letter, a single folded page, loose in the pile of papers inside, would have been easy to overlook. Trudy's words were not. Shot through with sorrow and regret, they bore witness to her fierce love for her child.

Trudy Steuernagel died eight days after the beating, at age 60.

11. Guys love cars.

Put a teen or a senior behind the wheel, set him loose on a dirt road or a freeway at 3 in the morning and he is a free man, a king in his mobile castle, a top-gunner, a strong, tireless, cunning and faithful lover.

Jerry Bruckheimer loves guys who love cars. He produces movies for them, four-on-the-floor vehicles like Days of Thunder (Tom Cruise in a stock car, making two hours of left turns) and The Rock (Nicolas Cage revving a yellow Ferrari). Beverly Hills Cop, Bad Boys, even Top Gun and Con Air (planes are just cars on a highway of clouds) and Armageddon (grease monkeys in outer space), all celebrate speed, combat and heavy machinery—three things that make every ride a macho adventure.  A Bruckheimer movie without a car chase would be like a Woody Allen movie without whining.

12. Selling jetliners is a bit like peddling religion.  Buying one requires an act of faith.
13. One night, one town, one bullet, one kid.

The kid was Justin Mello, barely 16 years old, popular soccer player at Anchor Bay High School, with a melting smile, a tall athletic frame, a freshly minted driver’s license and a dream of buying his father’s GMC truck with the money earned working at a pizza shop.

The bullet came from a 9-mm handgun that was fired just inches from Mello’s head as he knelt, execution style, in a cooler filled with dough and cheese. The bullet ripped through Mello’s skull and exited his forehead. When they found his body, he was still on his knees.

The town was New Baltimore, population 7,000, a quiet waterfront community in Macomb County where there hadn’t been a murder since before Justin was born.

The night was Saturday, Oct. 21. Before this, sighs a lawyer in the case, the biggest problem in New Baltimore was the fish flies. Not any more.