Why You Need a Lede

I was doing a photo shoot and layout for MaryLee Herrmann‘s theater performance of Schmaltzy and Princie: Diary or a Not-So-Great Daddy’s Girl, and as I was building it, I remembered my newspaper days and thought, “I have to have a lede photo,” one photo that’s larger than the others that can anchor the whole story.

It’s called a lede (journalism jargon) photo because often it would be on the front page, A1, leading the story, and then the rest of the supporting photos would be inside on the jump page, where it says “continued on page A7” or wherever it was placed.

When we’re putting photo packages together, it helps to have that lede photo rather than all of them the same size.

Here’s what I came up with. In most stories, you’d have wide shots and various close-ups, but this is a one-woman show so it’s a series of emotional moments from the performance.

The graphic worked. The show was a success. A story told in photographs.