Second-Day Leads

By Jeff Bailey
July 22, 2008 03:36 PM

A tried, if not true, vehicle for freshening up the news, the second-day lead -- topping the news with reaction, analysis or anything that can shed light on the original development -- is spreading across business pages even though readers indicate they have little use for these mostly-incremental stories.

The bigger the news development, the more follow-ups and second-third-fourth day leads we seem to produce, sort of like leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner. But the truth is that many beat reporters are so well informed these days, that their first-day analysis, included in the initial news story says it all.

Slapping an updated lead on news, 30 years ago, was often done to disguise the fact that the other paper in town beat us to the story. Today, the other paper in town is mostly out of business, and often, we'd be better off using the perfectly good wire copy available to us while staff reporters look into something everyone else isn't writing about because readers want new news.

In fact, newspapers most e-mailed and read story lists suggest readers prefer surprising news and strong views.

On July 1, The New York Times' business section's most-emailed story of the day was a business travel column with the welcome news that the Transportation Security Administration will soon allow people with newly-designed carry-on bags to pass through security without taking their laptop computers out for separate inspection.Then there was the story explaining why gallon milk jugs are changing shape and how the development is good for the environment and for the freshness of milk. Along the way in the milk jug story, we learn about the dairy business and the shipping business.

I'm not suggesting that newspapers and other news organizations cease covering ongoing developments in the biggest business stories -- the mortgage meltdown, a looming recession, surging oil prices -- which, to be sure, sometimes do produce repeated new news. Take for example, The Wall Street Journal's options backdating coverage, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for public service, or the long-term devotion of Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times to skewering CEOs for bloated compensation.

But for garden variety business news, once should be enough and papers could certainly be more restrained in the number of follow-up stories and in how those stories are played.

If we kill the need to always jump into the security of the second-day lead and many of the follow-up stories it tops, we might just make room for fresh topics and free up more time to report them.

The bottom line: we'll better serve our readers. Because somewhere along the way -- plowing through four or more daily newspapers, scanning the wires all day and trying to keep up with a slew of magazines -- even I, as a reader, began to tune out the incremental stories.

The most-emailed and most-viewed lists confirm that I'm not alone.

Jeff Bailey is a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He now works as a freelance magazine writer based in Chicago.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism