“An argument turns violent, leaving one man in the hospital...”

“A car bomb blows up, injuring six soldiers...”

“Fire guts a downtown warehouse...”


No, they’re not teases, headlines, topicals, or five-second promos. Unfortunately, these are lead paragraphs from actual story scripts, and there are many more where they came from.

This is an ugly and disturbing trend in many newsrooms. Ordered by managers and consultants to craft leads in the present tense no matter what, writers are taking this cheap shortcut. Instead of digging for real present-tense facts to update stories, they’re taking old events and making them look artificially “new”, simply by switching the verb, from “gutted” to “guts”, “blew up” to “blows up”, and so on. Each of those incidents - the argument, the explosion, the fire - was more than 12 hours old by the time it reached the 10 O'clock News, but the lead paragraphs tricked viewers into thinking something was happening right now. It’s a cheat. Folks eagerly waiting for the latest information got ripped off. They wanted what’s new. They got old news in a new suit.

This practice does have a bit of tradition behind it. Remember that kid in those old movies, hawking newspapers on the street corner? “Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Two-Headed Alligator Swallows New Jersey!” He was shouting in present tense about a past event. But remember, he wasn’t telling the whole story, just teasing it. Fiddling around with tenses in a tease is one thing. Letting that mentality bleed into the actual story is another, and it’s wrong, for a long list of reasons.

Grammar, for one thing. Sure, perhaps these days, when rebellion is cooler than rules, grammar shouldn’t be such a big deal. But it is. When your grammar is correct, your writing is clear and unambiguous. Break the rules carelessly, and you risk being misunderstood. This form of present tense is generally reserved for ongoing, regularly occurring events: “Sam eats corn flakes for breakfast every day.” “Bob works at the factory.” “Pop goes the weasel!” Try this with a news story, which is neither ongoing nor regular (does fire gut that warehouse each morning?) and you may think you sound current, but you just sound silly.

Grammar aside, using phony present tense flunks the crucial “best friend” test. We tell stories to real people. Our scripts should sound that way, like a friend talking to a friend. When your buddy asks you, “Hey, what’s new?”, you don’t answer, “Six people die in a multi-car crash,” do you? Nobody talks that way. If it doesn’t sound conversational, it shouldn’t be in the script.

Most troubling, though, is the fundamental untruth of this kind of writing. We’re supposed to be 100% truth-tellers. There’s no room for any kind of falsehood. Saying “A man is shot” when it happened 18 hours ago, is a lie. Most of us were attracted to this business because of its inherent honesty. Nothing we write should mislead people, not even a little.

We don’t have to abandon present tense writing. But let’s be honest about it. Let’s not lie about something old to make it appear new. That’s the lazy way out. Instead, let’s find what really is new. A fire in the morning means they’re looking for the cause right now! Displaced people have nowhere to sleep right now! A 6:00 A.M. gunfight means police are searching for a killer right now! A factory explosion means six workers are in the hospital right now! This is true present tense writing, what the managers and consultants had in mind all along. Phony present makes a story sound like a tease, or worse, a lie. Legitimate present tense moves a story forward.

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