Second-Day Lede

Friday, April 30, 2004

Not just a number

As every high-school journalism teacher knows, numbers induce numbness. Even big, important numbers, such as the more than 700 people in the U.S. military who have died in combat in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. We see them, we hear them, and we know those numbers represent people -- it's just hard to picture any of them, let alone so many. Sometimes the best way is to tell just one person's story, as Marine Lt. Col M.R. Strobl does in an eloquent first-person account, "Taking Chance Home." If you follow that link, you may notice that it's to a blog far to the right of this one. As Sen. John McCain pointed out today, paying tribute to the fallen is not partisan, despite what some small-minded broadcasting executives might think.
¶ 5:53 PM |

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...another look at the news and the industry that delivers it to us

By Janet Dagley Dagley

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What's a Second-Day Lede?

"Second-day lede" is journalistic jargon for putting a new spin on a story for a second or subsequent news cycle. A 'lede" is the lead sentence of an article, deliberately misspelled to make it more easily recognizable as jargon. Once upon a time, news moved in daily cycles, but now it has become a constant flow of rewrites and "second-day ledes."

Second-Day Lede is also the name of this blog, where you'll find commentary on the news, and especially on the industry that cultivates, harvests, processes, packages, distributes and delivers it to us.

Who's writing this stuff?

A veteran of more news cycles than she'd care to admit, Janet Dagley Dagley entered the profession of journalism as a teenager, covering local government meetings at night for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio, becoming a full-time staff writer at 18 and later moving on to the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times (Orange County Edition). Over the years she has worked as a freelance writer, editor, and radio producer in the U.S. and Europe. Although she has won numerous awards, she lost both times major metropolitan dailies submitted her work for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing, and also lost on Jeopardy! (though she did win a trip to Hawaii). Most recently, she was editor of AIRSPACE, the journal of the Association of Independents in Radio, a U.S.-based group of public-radio producers, and a member of the AIR Board of Directors. She has been blogging independently at The Dagley Dagley Daily since February, 2003.

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