Buried Lede

The story you're not telling, because the obvious one is drowning it out.

"We're enabling the sustainable transition, powering tomorrow."

The best story about your company is the one you've filed too far down to notice.

It's an old newsroom term. The buried lede is the best part of the story, the hook that should have been the headline, hidden three paragraphs down where everyone misses it.

Most companies have one. I find it.

THE PROBLEM

Every company in your sector tells the same true, safe, forgettable story.

“Enabling the transition.” “Powering tomorrow.” It clears legal, it pleases the board, but it makes you invisible.

The story that would actually set you apart is usually sitting right there, buried under the obvious one, and you're too close to it to see it. You may have said it out loud once, offhand, and moved on, because it felt too personal or too obvious to be the point.

It is the point. My job is to identify that hook and coax it out from you.

WHAT HAPPENS

A short, fixed engagement. Four steps.

I interview you

Properly, the way I'd interview anyone for a newspaper piece. It’s certainly not a branding questionnaire. This is where the real story usually hides, in the thing you say offhand. Getting people to say that thing is what I've done my whole career.

I read everything

Your site, your press releases, your posts, your competitors' too. I come at it the way a curious, sceptical journalist would, not a friendly vendor, because that's the eye that spots the gap between what you're saying and what you should be saying.

I write you a diagnosis

Here's the obvious story you're telling. Here's why it's costing you. Here's the truer, sharper story underneath it that your competitors can't copy, because it's actually yours. Something you keep, and can refer to whenever necessary.

We fix it together

A working session that turns the story into direction you can act on. Not finished copy. The spine of the thing: what you lead with, what you drop, how you sound like yourself again. Your team runs with it from there.

WHAT YOU GET

A written diagnosis of the story you're burying and the one you should tell, plus a working session that turns it into a direction your people can execute. The result is knowing what your story actually is, and how to keep telling it after I've gone.

WHAT I DON'T DO

I don't write your ongoing copy, run your channels, or hand you a template. This isn't an agency retainer and it isn't ghostwriting. I'm the editorial judgment you don't have in-house, applied to your material, once, sharply.

WHY ME

I've spent a career finding the hook someone didn't plan to give me.

Years as an editor at The Times, Reuters and the Daily Mail, deciding which stories were worth telling and which were everyone else's. I've had stories hit front pages because of a hook I teased out in an interview.

And I've spent the last seven years working in – and reporting on – your exact sector, watching confident, identical companies tell polished stories right up until events tested them. Knowing what your sector sounds like from the outside, and knowing how to get the real story out of you, is a rare pairing. It's the whole product.

START A CONVERSATION

Think you've got a buried lede?

You probably do. Tell me a little about your company and what you're wrestling with, and we'll see if there’s a hidden hook we can uncover.

Email me

Buried Lede

paul@buriedlede.co