New York Times Ledes

“The sacred text arrived at dusk on a Thursday in November”. 

The Obtuse Triangle, Nicholas Dawidoff, 23 June 2015.

Initially I was drawn to this story because the title, “The Obtuse Triangle”, stuck out in the sports section. As a sports fan, athlete, and recreational over thinker, I find geometry in sports fascinating and was simply hoping this story would explore the mathematics behind a certain style of play. The lede, however, completely reset my expectations. It took a much more narrative and dramatic tone than I anticipated from the title and excited me to be open to learning about much more than just one play. Even though this sentence provides very little useful information in relation to the rest of the piece, it hooks the reader in its mystery: what is this text considered “sacred” by basketball fanatics? Why was its arrival such a ceremonial experience for the writer? What is a story like this doing at the top of the sports section? 

The text, which turned out to be the original playbook containing the explanation of the Triangle Offense used by Phil Jackson in his coaching hey-day with the Bulls and Lakers, functions as an organizing element through out the piece. The author moves between his personal experience reading the playbook in an attempt to make sense of the misunderstood offensive system and the larger debate about what the Triangle actually is - if Phil Jackson is to credit for his teams successes; or if the Triangle is; or if neither of them are and it was solely the star power of his teams that generated so much success. In a story that brings together such a variety of anecdotes, histories, and sources it is settling for the reader to have this text to return to with the author to not feel lost amidst the non-chronological nature that information is distributed. 

However I found using the text as the angle of this article to be a slightly odd choice. The Warriors, who just won the NBA Championship, are coached by a former Bulls player who implemented his version of the Triangle with Golden State this season - clearly to a great effect. Jackson also re-implemented this offense with the Knicks this season to a dismal effect. These aspects of the story were both mentioned and explored in reasonable depth as separate entities, but I left wondering why the dynamic between these two outcomes was untouched and the original text given so much more weight. It does seem timely to explore this offense in the wake of this season, but this specific relevance seems strangely downplayed.

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“Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is climbing in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, and he has drawn thousands of people to rallies for his presidential campaign recently in Denver and Minneapolis. But the shooting last week in Charleston, S.C., has highlighted a daunting obstacle he faces in the Democratic primary contest: Black voters have shown little interest in him”. 

Bernie Sanders Lags Hilary Clinton in Introducing Himself to Black Voters, Patrick Healy and Johnathan Martin, 24 June 2015. 

While this lede does inform the reader of some of the conflict that the rest of the article will explore, the way in which the information is presented feels disordered. It seems important to include that his campaign is gaining traction in some states while Black voters have shown little movement in his direction, but the additional information about the specifics of his most recent campaigning and the shooting in Charleston seem like bits that could be returned to later in the story, especially because other, equally explored, aspects of the article are not included in the lede. It wasn’t clear from this combination of headline and lede what the specific focus of the article was going to be, which ends up mainly discussing his branding and ability to relate to non-white voters, as well as his former engagement with race issues and stance on gun control. The information within the article felt somewhat stitched together rather than seamlessly connected, just as the prioritized pieces of the lede felt like they were picked in an attempt to add buzzwords to the first paragraph rather than accurately indicate the direction and scope of the article. 

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This lede also deserves an honorable mention because, as far as obituaries go, this one is pretty great: 

“Don Featherstone did not invent Phoenicopterus ruber: Nature took care of that eons ago. But what Mr. Featherstone did nearly six decades ago — in the process indelibly altering the landscape of midcentury America — was to cast the creature in plastic and attach slender, rodlike legs for planting it in the ground.

Mr. Featherstone, a sculptor who died on Monday at 79, was the inventor of the pink plastic flamingo, that flagrant totem of suburban satisfaction and, in later years, postmodern irony.

He named it Phoenicopterus ruber plasticus.” 

Don Featherstone, Inventor of the Pink Flamingo (In Plastic) Dies at 79, Margalit Fox, 23 June 2015.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/sports/basketball/phil-jackson-knicks-triangle-offense-nba.html?hpw&rref=sports&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/politics/bernie-sanders-lags-hillary-clinton-in-introducing-himself-to-black-voters.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/business/don-featherstone-inventor-of-the-pink-flamingo-in-plastic-dies-at-79.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=third-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news