“What’s the lead?” is a very easy question to hear within journalism. But what exactly is a lead? You know when you ask that person who loves to tell a story to get straight to the point? So, what you want to know right away is the lead in journalism!

The lead is responsible for answering essential questions to tell the entire story in a short way. The need to start a story with the most important thing is also due to the time allocated to consuming news. Not every subject captures you until the last word, right?! 

This is why the writing model based on an inverted pyramid has proven to be so important within journalism. In it, the beginning of the text, the famous lead, must answer the second questions: What? Who? When? Where? As? Why? After that, it’s time to complement the story with whatever else has been learned. It’s time to present the secondary data and details to the reader.

But be careful!

Not all journalistic texts will work with this inverted pyramid structure. This format is more common to be seen in everyday news, those that are quickly consumed, whether on TV or in the printed newspaper. 

But some cases allow for a freer use, so to speak, of journalistic language. It's very common to read profiles, texts by literary journalists or even major reports that don't start out delivering the gold! Here we depend a lot on good old common sense to assess the extent to which it is possible to abuse this creative freedom and not use our beloved lead. 😉

Journalism x Marketing

These two areas of communication use the same term, but don't get confused , as the meanings are VERY different. For marketing, a lead represents a potential customer. There are several ways to meet and win qualified leads with marketing strategies.
The use of data within marketing allows paths within campaigns to be traced in order to reach the final sales objective even faster, after all, you will already know who you are talking to!