Burying the lead often occurs in journalism. This is a problem of how journalists stray away from reporting the most important point of a story. However this is a phenomenon that occurs in our everyday non-journalist lives as well. We often miss the core of an idea, message, work etc. that we are involved in.
I found the following book excerpt from Made to Stick (a book everyone must read) to be a profound illustration of this concept, that it instantly stuck with me. I am tempted to share it here:
Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher.
Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalist gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws - who, what, where, when, and why.
As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron's teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts:
"Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacremento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund 'Pat' Brown."
The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence:
"Governor Pat Brown, Margeret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento...."
The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment.
Finally he said, "The lead of the story is 'There will be no school next Thursday.'"
"It was breathtaking moment", Ephron recalls. "In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn't enough about to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered."
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