Lede / burying the lede

The lede is the opening (usually one sentence, sometimes a short paragraph) that carries the actual point of the piece. 'Lede' is simply the newsroom spelling of 'lead'. The tidy story that journalists coined it to avoid confusion with the typesetter's metal lead is repeated everywhere and supported by nothing; the spelling shows up in newsroom usage fairly late. Two flavors: the hard news lede states the outcome flat out, and the delayed or feature lede opens with a scene or a detail and pays off a little further down, in the nut graf, which is the paragraph that says what the story is actually about.

Burying the lede is what you did when the most interesting or consequential fact is sitting three paragraphs down, behind throat clearing: context, history, a definition of a word nobody asked about. The test is mechanical. Read your draft, circle the single most surprising or useful sentence, and check where it sits. If it is not in the first two sentences, either move it up or defend why the delay earns its keep.

Gotcha: the warm-up paragraph feels necessary to the writer because they needed it to get going. The reader never does. This is also the single most reliable tell in AI drafts, which reflexively open with a throat-clearing generality about the industry before saying anything. Delete the first paragraph and see if the piece got worse. Usually it got better.