"If it bleeds, it leads."

One missed footstep sends tiny pieces of metal and grits of sand propelling through the air faster than you can think. Men and women hide behind cars, pillars, and anything else that might shield them from the flying debris. The terror overwhelms them and they can only hope that they will escape unharmed. Most of them do escape, but the unlucky few are left bleeding in the wake of the explosion. Got you interested, didn't I? As Peter Diamandis pointed out, "If it bleeds, it leads."

Without a good lead, an article is nothing. Whether they are hard or soft, leads that draw people in best are often those that get straight to the action (like what I wrote above). Hard leads are a little less likely to bring people in with blood and gore because they are rooted in getting straight to the facts; soft leads, on the other hand, have more to do with creative writing. A lot of writers who use soft leads try to put readers into the action, as I did.

The way our culture is today, we react most to violence and gore on the news. This points journalists to report more on violent crimes and it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. If they don't report on what the public wants to read, people stop buying the newspaper (or looking at the newspaper's website), and the journalists lose their jobs. Because newspapers are dying out, it seems that publishers are looking to print only stories that will sell newspapers. They focus more on what people want to read instead of the integrity of the paper. Now I'm not saying that our newspapers don't have the integrity they used to; I just mean to point out that the aim is sales not important stories, which is not how it should be.