The Lead Lab

Course Overview

Title:
The Lead Lab
Type:
Self-Directed Course
Time Estimate:
This course takes about an hour to complete.

About Self-Directed Courses

In a self-directed course, you can start and stop whenever you like, progressing entirely at your own pace and going back as many times as you want to review the material.

Whether you're reporting news or telling a story, you know you have to entice your audience instantly. That's the job of the lead. The lead of a story makes a promise to the reader of good things to come. Do you deliver on that promise every time you write a lead? Have you ever wondered how to craft better leads? This course is here to help.

First, take a spin around the Lead Lab. Use your cursor to discover "hot spots." Find something interesting? Click the hot spot to learn more. After you've explored the lab, you'll get to write a few leads of your own based on facts from a real story. Once you've written your leads, submit them to the Lead Forum to see how your lead compares with other leads written by course participants just like you.

The Lead Lab course material is drawn from Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century, by Christopher Scanlan, published by Oxford Univeristy Press.

What Will I Learn:

Upon completing this course, you will:

  • Be able to craft better leads
  • Have refreshed your lead-writing basics
  • Dispel common myths about leads
  • Revise your own leads better
Who should take this course:

This course is for anyone who wants to write better leads on news stories, but it's also for people who just want to write more compelling copy. No matter what you are writing, you need a hook to get readers interested.

Course Instructor:

Chip Scanlan

Chip Scanlan, visiting associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and former faculty at The Poynter Institute, spent two decades as a reporter, feature writer and national correspondent, and won 16 awards for writing, congressional reporting and public service, including a Robert F. Kennedy award for his exposé of hazardous exports to developing countries.

Technical Requirements:

For this course you will need to have at least version 7.0 of the Flash plugin installed. For the best experience, we suggest that:

  • PC users use Internet Explorer or Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox
  • Mac users use Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox or Safari
  • you set your monitor resolution to 1024 x 768 or higher
  • you use a high speed connection