Beginnings say as much about who begins them as they do about what they begin.

Journalists and writers, of professional kind or independent and online, take very seriously the ledes they produce and how others see them.

It’s very likely that I have had harsher scrutiny for ledes I’ve written than for anything else, and it’s even more likely you’ve found the same. Thusly, I’ve gotten lots of lede lessons through the years, particularly those with a bite or two that are worth sharing.

Below, lessons I’ve learned about crafting a strong lede. Share your own, so I can add to this list.

1. The rule: Don’t bury the lede
   My mistake: There is a difference between a soft, feature lede to tell a story and simply stringing a reader on for too long before making it clear what’s the story’s point. It’s a delicate balance and something we all grapple with in the industry, myself absolutely included.
   The reasoning: If you want to write a novel, get a publisher, an editor once told me. Online writing, newspapers and magazines have always been pithy media, so to understand that, spice in your storytelling with a solid point.
2. The rule: Don’t use a quotation
   My mistake: I once submitted a story to Allentown Morning Call state Capitol reporter John Micek in which I took a quote from a particularly quotable government activist.
   The reasoning: Only one time in all of history will a quotation admissible in a lede,” he told me. That’ll read: “I’m back,” Jesus said. More broadly, don’t give a single source so much power over the story as to lead it.
3. The rule: Avoid cliches, like these
   My mistake: An Inquirer story of mine fell into the ‘just another day on the job’ catch.
   The reasoning: Simply nothing more unforgivable exists in modern writing. No faster way to turn off readers exists.
4. The rule: “To use ‘and’ in a lede, you better have a good reason and think about it twice.”
   My mistake: Hell, I still spend a good portion of my writing career trying to jam as many phrases and flowery language into my first sentence.
   The reasoning: A lede is meant to welcome, first, and inform second. Don’t overburden the reader too early. Keep your writing tight, particularly in the start.
5. The rule: “There are no reasons for using ‘There are’ to lede a story.”
   My mistake: Handing a former Washington Post executive editor this column of mine from my college newspaper.
   The reasoning: Give the reader a strong noun or verb within four words, and ‘there are’ can almost always be replaced. i.e. “There are a handful of fresh sculptures at 11th and York streets,” could easily and perhaps more powerfully become “[Five] fresh sculptures stand naked in the wind at 11th and York streets.

These posts take a more academic approach but aren’t half bad: seen here, here and here.

What other rules have I missed?

Just a week after I took a full-time job and told the club’s adviser that I’d have to take a bit of a sabbatical from my time there, I wanted to give a primer to have a conversation about the basics of journalism with her students.

In fewer than ten minutes, I tried to bottle an entire journalism degree into five bullet points. Clearly I missed plenty.

Below, see what I shared. Let me know what giant holes these high school kids will have in their foundation because of my failures!

1. Who, Why, Where,What and When (and sometimes how) — Yes, cliche or not, those are the five questions every good news story strives to answer. See inverted pyramid!
2. Lede (yes, we journos spell it that way) — The ‘topic sentence’ for you English teachers is the most important sentence of any story. It’s meant to draw the reader in (point to any number of print pubs that might be floating around in your school). There are two basic types: a feature (or soft lede) and a news (or hard) lede. Simply, a feature lede starts off with a story, and a news lede starts off with fact. They’re each important for relevant stories. Check any newspaper story, and you’ll be able to point out the difference.
3. A quote high (high=early in the story) — I always tell kids that just like how you wish you could hear a different person’s voice in biology class, in news stories we try to break the text up with interesting quotes from other people. So, as soon as it is relevant, most good news stories have a direct quotation that says something interesting and comes from someone relevant from the story. So we need our kids to interview different people (not their friends) and write down exactly what they say.
4. Nut graf — Usually the first thick graf (yes, we journos spell them that way) This is the core of why this story is important, and what the basic details are. Usually, the Who, Why, Where,What and When in its most condensed format. The important part of this for the kids is that we want to get up high why a story is relevant to the reader. It’s the take away the reader should get. (I just went to Philly.com and the top story was on the Sixers, I pulled it up and I see the nut graf, which  is “Tonight’s version of opportunity missed…” it gives me the importance of the story. (And note that it is, like most sports stories, a feature lede).
5. Check facts, check facts, check facts — How do you spell that name, what is her title, where did this story come from and more.

I also directed her to Poynter’s recent list of 100 things a journalist must do.

Any big concepts I missed?

Before I suspended my trips to Frankford High School to work with the school’s journalism club, we established what would have been a nice rhythm.

Every Thursday, I would come and give a lesson, and the following Monday, the students would use what we talked about and put it into practice by getting out of the classroom and shuttling around the school.

With Pioneer Times adviser Beth Ziegenfus, I established a rough curriculum time line, which you can see below and the details of which I hope to continue to share here.

1. Session One: Let students play with cameras and write whatever they want for a sense of excitement.
2. Session Two: Journalism basics (lede, inverted pyramid and the like)
3. Session Three: Interviewing (what types of questions, how to act, how to approach strangers, why not to speak to friends, etc.)
4. Session Four: Photography (basics of using and uploading from a simple point-and-click)
5. Session Five:  Social Media (basics of using a platform like WordPress and using an RSS feed for, say, a student’s Facebook page — and why that stuff is important)
6. Session Six: Video (sometimes troublesome at schools that block video hosting sites, it still helps to teach the basics of keeping videos short, steady and impactful — also touch on using a camera, uploading and posting)
7. Session Seven: The Web (this is where you might explain something about hosting, domains and blogging)

Other items that might interest someone starting to teach a journalism club

• Basic tools most journalists need
• More specifics on tools I use
• Handling clips in the digital age

I spent portions of a couple school years while at college helping get a newspaper underway at the Franklin Learning Center, a strong, diverse magnet school in the Spring Garden neighborhood of Philadelphia.

So, I was excited to take some time away from my freelancing work once a week to work with the journalism club at Frankford High School. It was a short walk, and I could just fill in the time lost at night.

I was suddenly the professional journalist half of a Prime Movers program that formerly had me as the student journalist.

I made it a half dozen Thursday after-school meetings, enough to meet the core group of seven or so students and help them launch a WordPress blog for their content, but some rather large, fairly unexpected changes have happened.

I bought a house in a neighborhood that made the trip a 15-minute El ride (and added some responsibility) and, as a larger conflict, I then accepted a full-time job.

So, now I’m reaching out to a host of colleagues to fill as many of the coming weeks with insightful professional journalists (if you’re in Philly and are interested, contact me). Still, though I’ve worked with high school journalism clubs before and only worked with the Pioneer Times of FHS for a couple months, I certainly learned a thing or too — in addition to, I hope, teaching some of those kids something.

Class photo from a Frankford High School long since gone

Frankford High School is a school that, like the neighborhood it served, was once lily white and has seen a dramatic complexion change since.

According to School District of Philadelphia data, as recent as the 2003/2004 school year, a quarter of it’s roughly 2,000 students were white, but now fewer than one in ten are. While Asian and Latino numbers have remained relatively stable over that time, a school that was half populated by black students in 2003 has now settled around more than 60 percent.

That usually makes for some strife, and an uptick in lower income students and suspensions seems to have followed.

But it certainly isn’t known to be anywhere near as dysfunctional and (relatively) dangerous as other big public schools in Philadelphia. Rather, it has active after school programs — like the journalism club and its celebrated culinary program, which the focus of a feature-length documentary that debuted last year. Additionally, while the student population’s look has changed, the school still has an active alumni group and some notable ones among them.

It was with this knowledge that I first came to the school in October to meet journalism club adviser Beth Ziegenfus, who, by measure of the 10 or so students attendance on that first day, was well-liked and caring.

I shared with them the coverage of their neighborhood, from community blog Frankford Gazette, to the localized coverage of NEast Philly to the Northeast Times.

Also, over the next few weeks, I came to know a handful of the group’s regularly attending members, tried to dispense as much general knowledge on journalism, writing and multimedia as I could and, yes, became certain of a few truths.

Read the take aways from last stint helping to lead a journalism program.

1. All kids aren’t ready to give up the printed product — It’s in college that most people become really Web native, with the dispersal of high speed Internet, online assignments, IM and other college standards. This will, of course, continue to shift, but my FHS kids were all interested in seeing their byline in print. (Something I’ve experienced before.)
2. Kids in a journalism club are going to be among the best of the best, so treat them that way — This is certainly something I’ve already experienced, but it’s always nice to be reminded. Kids who are going to give up their after school time for journalism are going to be
3. Make it more than journalism — Journalism and the Fourth Estate and Democracy and all that bull shit doesn’t interest 99.9999999 percent of high school students. Talk about deadline and lede writing and multimedia and Web development being great for succeeding in college
4. Do let kids play with multimedia — All the kids got excited about running around the school with a camera for video and photos. (Get them excited first, then bring on the learning)
5. Talk to high school kids like adults, because they (practically) are — Come on, you remember hating that teacher who treated you like a child. Give them the benefit of the doubt, understand that they may know something you don’t and act like it.

I hope to make it back there, at some point, if some flexibility comes my way at my new job, but, unfortunately, a three p.m. start time in a neighborhood that is probably 30-35 minutes from my work doesn’t make that seem likely anytime soon.

Indeed, the over-heightened echo chamber of circular praise and obsessive coverage and conversation on those now familiar Web-based tools stem from their truly trans-formative power.

I’ve taken an interest in all of that. Enough so that, in addition to the conferences at which I’ve spoken, conversations I’ve had and now the full-time job I enjoy, from time to time I’ve been asked to walk others through the good of what social media can have.

A lot of times, the requests come from or are on behalf of small business owners who keep hearing that these damn Internet buzz companies are going to help them make more money. Often times, they don’t know how, don’t want to try or are too turned off by the schmaltz and self-styled gurus to even think it’s for them.

That’s good. I think that’s all lame, too. It’s an opportunity to speak like a real person and keep it all appropriately relative. Facebook and Twitter and blogging are not important, but they can be important for promoting something you love to do, which, in turn, is important.

So, I’m happy to announce that, next month I’ve been asked to lead a small teleconferencing course called ‘Basic Blogging for Business.’

Below, I share some of the details of this and a similar class I taught with the same group in the fall.

My class is the third in a four part series designed for small business owners without a lick of knowledge about plopping onto the Web and using social media to promote what they do.

The cost is $129. See all class descriptions here, and register here.

My 90-minute course’s description:

Basic Blogging for Business.

Monday, March 8 @ 8 p.m.

Less than 10 years old and already, blogging is a force in the marketing, promotion and customer development sphere. In this class, taught by an experienced blogger well-versed in brand building online, we’ll go over why a small business should have a blog, how much work it really requires and the absolute basics of getting started, like choosing a platform and making your first post. We’ll also touch on tools that’ll make your blog more dynamic and worth returning to.

In November, with the same group, I taught a class on incorporating multimedia in existing WordPress platforms — basically a step above the class I’ll be teaching in March.

A month or so before that, I was approached — by way of a friend — by the woman who decided to put the courses together, mostly designed for a cohort of small business owners she knew and who had requested some training in the realm of social media.

It’s far and away from walking to a factory to make a widget, but I enjoy getting interested people started in anything, even if it is Web based.

Let me know if you have any questions.

The stairway of the Franklin Learning Center that I took to Mr. Sedwin's classroom each week.

You’re supposed to learn from teaching, or something like that.

I suppose with that knowledge in hand, I knew I’d learn something when, two years ago, I first walked into the Franklin Learning Center, a magnet high school in the Spring Garden neighborhood of Philadelphia.

I was there to help launch a student newspaper. I, too, was a student, writing for The Temple News, the college newspaper of Temple University.

Sometimes we’d get as many as 10 students to turn out, but there was a faithful three or four who kept coming out.

In fall 2006, I first went out to FLC and we had enough success that I was asked to speak on a panel at the national Journalism Education Association national conference held in Center City in November 2007. I stuck with it until April 2008, as we watched some of those more faithful students get after-school jobs and peter out. While I started on my own as a pilot, my work there was eventually rolled into a growing Prime Movers program.

It wasn’t an eternity, but nearly two full school years working on a school newspaper was something. I learned plenty that was relevant.

• Sometimes, bigger goals are easier than small ones — We struggled a lot with getting the deadlines met, a product put out, an audience built and sustainability instituted. In fact, the revived Franklin mostly died as I was transitioning out because of my graduation. But I couldn’t help but think of the handful of kids with whom I had contact and think about the lessons they learned, the directions they took and the interest many developed. Those were bigger successes, I felt.
• Most students still valued a print product — We didn’t have the cash for this yet, and they were still interested in seeing their byline anywhere, including online, but print still had this value to most.
• Writing is a bigger draw than journalism — Covering a community in anyway wasn’t nearly as interesting to most of our students as writing of any kind. Poetry, by example, was one of the most popular requests to contribute. We also had a lot of requests to be columnists — a request I pushed back on, actually.
• Get a group of kids together and you’d be surprised about different interests – Of our core group of five, we had a better leader, someone more interested in managing the web, someone who wanted to offer design and art, someone who wanted to write poetry and someone who wanted to report.
• Having a teacher-adviser who the students like is instrumental – I was blessed to be working with Jeff Sedwin, an older, more established teacher whom most students seemed to like, respect and trust. …While mostly easy going, he wasn’t afraid to come down on kids. He was a great fit.
• A little energy and passion goes a long way -- It is so obvious if you actually enjoy what you’re doing. If you’re having fun and are comfortable and know what you’re talking about, it’ll come through.
• Don’t keep anyone there at will -- He or she will infect the group.