<p> How-to: Feature Leads h/t The Student Newspaper Survival Guide by Rachele Kanigel</p><p>Three seconds. That’s all the time you have to capture your reader’s attention, studies have shown.</p><p>As a result, the most important part of journalistic writing is the lead, or introduction. If you want your reader to make it to the very last word, you’ll need a great first few sentences to capture their attention.</p><p>Feature leads often take a storytelling approach. They may start with an anecdote or scene that draws a picture for the reader. </p><p>Feature leads are usually several sentences, or even several paragraphs, long. After that, writers need to include a nut graph to explain what the story is actually about. The nut graph explains the point of the story and why readers should care. Here’s an example of a feature lead and nut graph:</p><p>When Charles Martin left the University of Arkansas in 1941 to fly C-87’s across the infamous Himalayan passage to China called “The Hump,” he was a senior and “president of everything,” he said, chuckling as he looked through his UA Razorback yearbook.</p><p>Now, while working through UA reporting courses, he suffers occasional “senior moments” of another type.</p><p>“It’s so much more difficult now,” he said. “I don’t know if you know what a senior moment is, but sometimes I have senior moments and it makes exams a lot harder.”</p><p>Martin, his hair grayed and his 6-foot-2-inch frame bent by arthritis, will walk with the class of 2005 and earn a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, the degree he started in 1937.</p><p>Another type of feature lead evokes a vivid image:</p><p>It is mid-July, and piles of papers are scattered across the floor and tables of Assistant Dean of Freshmen Lesley Nye Barth’s Hurlbut Hall apartment. As she sorts through the collection of papers, her cat wanders into the room, stepping on and destroying a few carefully ordered stacks—groups of four roommates that she had spent hours assembling as she culled 550 or so housing applications for the perfect match. The cat’s romp sends her back to step one, and she gathers the papers to rematch the students.</p><p>Such is the life of the three assistant deans of freshmen (ADFs), Barth, James N. Mancall, and Sue Brown, who spend nearly two-and-a-half months hand-picking rooming groups and then assigning these groups to create entryways.</p><p>It’s a process that takes hundreds of hours and turns the summer—when most administrators take a relaxing break from the frenetic pace of the school year—into some of the busiest months for the Freshman Deans Office (FDO). Critiquing Feature Leads</p><p>Let’s see if the following leads do their host publications justice:</p><p>1. From ESPN: The Magazine:</p><p>Let’s start with the positives. On Sept. 8, 2002, the Houston Texans won the first coin toss in franchise history. Good. Then quarterback David Carr threw a touchdown pass on the fourth play of the first game in franchise history. Very, very good. That led to an opening day win against the Cowboys, the one team Houston fans hated even before the Oilers skipped town. It didn’t get any better than that. No, really. It didn’t get any better than that.</p><p>2. From Dirt Bike Mag:</p><p>Evolution. Whether you like it or not, is a fact of life. Sure, we could argue all day about whether or not man actually evolved from single-celled protozoa or was simply molded into man from a handful of dirt by a benevolent God, but that’s not my point. I’m talking more about things like hammerhead sharks and giraffes. Things that have adapted to fit the nature of their surroundings and the times they’re living in. Even more specific than that, I’m talking about the new SAM Dirt Bike: The Next Generation.</p><p>3. From Scientific American:</p><p>Roger Penrose is a serious man with serious ideas. He is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He shared the 1988 Wolf Prize for Physics with Stephen J. Hawking. He was knighted in 1994. He has mused about the physics underlying human consciousness in two well-received books, The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. He is also in a big fight over toilet paper.</p><p>4. From a Campus Progress-sponsored magazine. This story is about labor relations between the college and its cafeteria and custodial staff.</p><p>“A man must work in order to live. If he can express no control over his conditions of employment, he is subject to involuntary servitude,” proclaims a Senate report on the Norris- LaGuardia Act. Congress passed the act in 1932 as a response to the allegedly biased judicial rulings against labor interests. The act ensured the rights of employees to bargain collectively for fair working conditions. Since the rise of the modern labor movement at the time of the Industrial Revolution, workplace reform in the United States has evolved to include improved industry standards as well as legislation to protect workers. While the standards of living for unskilled workers in industrialized nations tend to exceed historical norms, working conditions are still not ideal.</p><p>5. From teen magazine J.17:</p><p>Underneath Christina Aguilera’s tough, rebellious exterior is a fragile, young woman with a lot of pain and frustration bottled up inside. She insists that she’s doing just fine, but is she really?</p><p>6. From GQ:</p><p>Matthew McConaughey is looking forward to making coozies. You know, those squishy rubber can holders that keep the Bud cold and the beer sweat off your hands. His production company, j.k. livin, is rolling out, which means McConaughey is reading scripts and considering projects and, well, a man best considers a project with a drink in his hand, and what better to swathe the drink than a j.k. livin coozy? “Yeah man, coozies,” he says slowly, almost perversely, with sand in his voice, followed by “ye-ah, ye-ah” – long, rough and dirty. It’s a stoner’s voice, a whisper of California and a gutful of Texas. A seedy drawl, lazy and sop rich with aw-rights, heymans and whatz-ats? “Coozies, man,” he says again, blue eyes jiggling, bare feet propped up on a nearby chair, exposing his smooth ankles, tanned a butternut brown because, among other things, McConaughey is not a sock wearer. He grins conspiratorially, and you can’t help but picture it – the spongy foam rubber squeezing just hard enough, the beer inside perfect, guzzle-able, cool. He keeps grinning, all crinkle eyed, staring you dead in the pupils, daring you not to feel his joy, and you can’t help but think, Yeah, what the hell – coozies, man. Right on. How awesome would that be? And you want one for yourself; no, you want to be invited to McConaughey’s house in Malibu to use one of his because then you’re a brother, man; you’re a coozy cousin, laid-back and easy and comfortable, spitting chaw and swigging beer and soaking sun and just hanging. You want all this because this is Matthew McConaughey’s éclat, his way, and in a world rife with attitude, posturing, whiners, oozers and guys who roll their eyes, a 27-year-old man who makes more than $2 million per picture and still gets jazzed about coozies is a man you want to be like or be liked by or sleep with or, at the very least, buy a drink. Which happens to McConaughey a lot, especially since, given a choice, he would rather eat at the bar. Feature Lead & Nut Graph Writing</p><p>A reporter’s shift just ended and he needs you to write a story he just reported on. The piece will be published in the weekly magazine in Hoof, Nebraska. Here’s a transcript of the reporter’s notes. Please write a lead and nut graph, approximately 2-5 sentences in total.</p><p>Frazier Mohawk is the owner of Puck’s Farm near Hoof, Nebraska. The farm produces dairy products, corn, honey and eggs. Also, it’s near an educational center. School children and others come to see rural life, with more than 50,000 people visiting Puck’s last year.</p><p>Mr. Mohawk decided to sell advertising space at his farm to raise more money. Last week, Mr. Mohawk told local businesses that for $500 a year, he would rent them the side of one of his cows. The ads are on two-foot-by-three-foot pieces of oilcloth strapped onto the cow. Since Hoof is midway between Lincoln and Omaha, the state’s two largest cities, Mr. Frazier figures that more than 100,000 people would see the cows each year as they drive between the two cities.</p><p>“I figure that bus ads are so commonplace that people quickly forget them, but they’ll remember a message on the side of a cow for the rest of their lives,” Frazier says.</p><p>The farm wants to rent both sides of all six of its cows. “We hope people like the dairy council and the milk marketing board will see the value of advertising in the field,” Mohawk added. For an extra $7 a month, the advertiser can rent a cowbell to attract attention. Advertisers also are in line for a bonus, because if a cow gives birth while she’s wearing a sign, the advertiser gets a sign on the calf for free. If the cow has twins, it’s a double bonus.</p><p>“If you buy one of those billboards downtown, even if they do proliferate, they don’t have babies,” Mohawk said.</p><p>Mohawk said he got the idea because he wanted to maximize the farm’s investment. “After selling dairy products and manure, the only thing we hadn’t found a use for was the outside of the cow. With our mediacows, as we call them, we’ve entered the modern age.”</p><p>Since the farm began selling space last week, one restaurant has signed up, for just one side of one cow. Farmer Mohawk said: “We’re expecting to see him buy the other side because cows lie down a lot and it’s sort of Russian roulette as to which side they’ll lie on.”</p><p>Mr. Mohawk said he had a call from another interested party, who said he represented a political party. “He wanted to rent a bull, but we don’t know if it would be for his party or the opponent. Also, I don’t know if the caller was serious.”</p><p>A spokesman for the Nebraska Advertising Standards Council, an industry group, said the council regulates the content of ads, but not where they’re displayed. “We’re not after their hide; I guess they can milk it for all it’s worth,” the spokesman said.</p>