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Post being replied to

I think it's a back formation... by Kbyrnes

...OED Online has "lede" in two senses. The first defines it as an Old English term attested to the year 951 meaning "people," and cognate with the modern German Leute (and all kinds of Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old Church Slavonic, and Old This-n-That languages from the central and northern areas of Europe).

The second sense defines it as we are discussing in this thread, and attests it back to 1951:

1951 Pampa (Texas) Daily News 21 June 17/2 "Lead (Lede)—Opening of a news story, ordinarily summarizing the rest of it."

The next attestation is in WaPo in 1979. My gut feeling is that I became aware of it in the 80s, not because I was working at an academic publication but just from seeing it here and there in print. At any rate, the 1951 appearance in a rather non-mainstream Texas newspaper suggests that the term used in our sense wasn't actually invented by Linotype sentimentalists in the 1970s, though they may have expanded its frequency.