Breaking Down A Lead

Here is the lead:


FoxNews.com - "Looks like some drug smugglers are trying to spice things up.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers arrested a man trying to sneak $1.4 million worth of marijuana into California in boxes of hot sauce.

A 39-year-old Mexican citizen arrived at the Otay mesa cargo facility Friday driving a tractor attached to a trailer filled with boxes. The Tijuana resident claimed the boxes were full of hot sauce, but when officers ran the vehicles through the port’s x-ray system, they found inconsistencies in the cargo."

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/09/06/us-customs-officers-find-more-than-ton-marijuana-in-hot-sauce-shipment/#ixzz1XDX9229O


In the lead the author first catches the readers attention with an interesting topic, weed. From there they start to bring up the 5w's: who, what, where, when, and why. How, is often brought up or later explained.


Everything that the author wrote in this short article had a purpose. There was no extra thrown in; they gave the reader enough information to know what happen. It starts with telling the reader what the law officers found [what]. They also tell the reader who found all the weed and who the man was that did it [who]. Then how much they found, which was about 2330 pounds of weed. It was being smuggled to California [where] on Friday [when] in a shipment with hot sauce [how]. With $1.4million worth of weed people can tell [why] he was trying to get all of it in Cali.


The little that the author did write is just enough for a good lead, but if one was to write the rest of the article, they would go into further details on the incident. It was written in good lead form and the important information got out to the reader without going into full detail.