OBSERVANCE OF STYLE
Your style of writing the lead will depend somewhat on the custom of the paper for which you are working. Some newspapers still insist rigidly on the who-what-when-where-why rule for beginning all except feature stories and short items. Others are departing more and more from the rule. The tendency nowadays on a few well-edited newspapers (notably the Kansas City Star and Times) is to tell the story chronologically from the start, leaving out the lead or introduction altogether, except perhaps in the case of especially important happenings such as the mine disaster referred to above. This is probably the result of the growing importance of the headline in the modern newspaper. Formerly newspapers were content to use general headings, such as “Very Important,” “The Latest from Europe” and “Court News,” but the present-day newspaper aims to tell the story specifically in the head. Thus the average news story really is put before the reader three times—once in the head, again in the lead and finally in the story proper. Doubt of the wisdom in all cases of this double repetition is responsible for the tendency to drop the lead and let the headline usurp its place. No invariable rules as to when this is advisable can be laid down. The writer should study carefully the style of his paper and be guided by it.