'Burying' The Lede

From Tom via my inbox: This, my friends, is a test case for deadline narrative. Here we have a story — a first-day exclusive story, no less — that delays its gruesome punchline till the fourteenth paragraph. The question before you today is whether it should have given readers the gold upfront, or whether its timing was just right, or whether, as my colleague Michael Kruse has suggested, the punchline actually came too soon.

This is what appeared before the jump in today's St. Petersburg Times:

The headline: She was reported missing, but she never left home.

The subhed: A 38-year-old woman vanishes. Her family searches for days. Then, a macabre discovery.

NEW PORT RICHEY — Mariesa Weber vanished three days before Halloween, leaving her purse and new suede jacket. She was 38, loved rock 'n' roll, lived with her sister and parents. She left the bedroom light burning.

Her family thought she had been kidnapped. They called the Pasco County Sheriff's Office and put out fliers that said MISSING PLEASE HELP. They posted her description at SomeoneIsMissing.com. They appealed to Nancy Grace on CNN.

Days passed with no clues except for a strange smell coming from Mariesa's bedroom. They turned it inside out. Nothing. They blamed it on Norway rats, gorged on poison, dead behind the wall.

Mariesa turned up nearly two weeks after she disappeared. She was not pulled from a culvert or fished from a cypress swamp. For the people who loved her, it was even worse.

"I'm sleeping in the same house as her for 11 days, looking for her," said her mother, Connie Weber. "And she's right in the bedroom."

(snip)

OK. So if you're picking up today's paper, that's all you get before deciding whether or not to turn inside and read the rest. Do you do it? Think about that a moment.

All right. Now that we're all on the same page, let's discuss this. Because it gets to the core of what we do.

Before I wrote this story yesterday, I talked quite a bit with my editors about what approach to take. One point that I raised: This story is so inherently fascinating that would take some real doing to mess it up. In other words, if all I did was slap together an inverted pyramid, it would still be one of the day's most talked-about stories. Some stories are like that. Get too cute and you drain the power.

We talked, and we talked some more, and we finally came to a consensus. This is a little like an Edgar Allan Poe short story. The payoff comes in the horrible revelation, and you want to string the reader along until it comes. So that's what I did. I seeded the top with some fairly obvious clues, hoping readers would follow me past the jump. After the story was filed, an editor downtown called up to question our approach, to say what we should probably just put the bookcase detail in the second graf. He was ultimately outvoted, but I think he had a point.

Look at a major newspaper Web site like Boston.com. What do you see most consistently on its list of most e-mailed stories? Are they local? No. Are they narrative? No. They are invariably AP stories about bizarre things that happened somewhere else in the world, like a cat terrorizing a neighborhood or an Indian man accidentally divorcing his wife in his sleep, and they are written as straight as a razor. People seem to like that. Get in, get out. Don't make me wait.

So. Where does that leave us? We here have a bias in favor of narrative, of letting the story unfold and hoping the reader will join us for the ride. Are there times when we need to squelch that desire? Are we arrogant to think that our writing skills are more important than the story itself?

Or should we just press on, hoping to train readers to expect something richer?