What is Lede?
The lede (intentionally spelled to distinguish it from "lead" type) is the opening sentence or paragraph of a news story or press release. It carries the most important fact, the news hook, and the reason the reader should keep reading. In the AI era the lede has gained a second job: it is the chunk LLMs are most likely to extract and cite, which makes lede craftsmanship a discoverability investment, not just a copy chore. Crackle PR writes ledes as if they will be extracted by an LLM (because they will be) — one clean fact, no throat-clearing, no adjective spam.
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