Straight Lede vs Feature Lede

The Straight-Lede Game Story

The straight-lede game story is the most basic story in all of sportswriting. It's just what it sounds like: an article about a game that uses a straight-news type of lede. The lede summarizes the main points - who won, who lost, the score, and what the star player did.

Here's an example of this kind of lede:

Quarterback Pete Faust threw thre touchdown passes to lead the Jefferson High School Eagles to a 21-7 victory over crosstown rival McKinley High.

The rest of the story follows from there, with an account of the big plays and playmakers, and after-game quotes from coaches and players. Because they often focus on high school and small-college teams, straight-lede game stories tend to be fairly tightly written.

Straight-lede game stories are still used for coverage of high school and some college sports. But they're used less nowadays for pro sports. Why? Because pro sports are seen on TV and most fans of a particular team know the score of a game long before they read about it.

The Feature-Lede Game Story

Feature-lede game stories are common for pro sports. Readers usually already know the score of pro games as soon as they're done, so when they pick up a sports section they want stories they offer a different angle on what happened and why.

Here's an example of a game story feature lede:

It had rained all that day in the city of brotherly love, so when the Philadelphia Eagles took the field the ground was already a soggy mess - much like the game that would follow.

So it was somehow fitting that the Eagles would lose 31-7 to the Dallas Cowboys in a contest that was one of the worst of quarterback Donovan McNabb's career. McNabb threw two interceptions and fumbled the ball three times.

The story starts out with some description, and doesn't get to the final score until the second paragraph. Again, that's fine: readers will already know the score. It's the writer's job to give them something more.

Delayed-lede game stories tend to be a bit more in-depth that straight-lede stories, and as a result are often longer.