Leads are fundamental elements of the news story. This study follows an interdisciplinary approach, analyzing the lead through journalistic definitions and linguistic descriptions. The corpus was composed of 200 leads in English and Portuguese, collected from two American newspapers and two Brazilian newspapers, in two different periods: 12 to 14 September, 2001, and 29 and 30 November, 2001. Using genre analysis theory, leads are defined, in this dissertation, as a subgenre of the news story genre (Biber, 1988, Swales, 1990). Also it is possible to view the lead in analogy to Halliday`s (1985) concept of Theme. Finally, this research paper presents a tentative classification of the leads according to their structure and function, dividing them in four categories: objective, effect phrase, contextualized and intergenre. Statistic tests were applied to the corpus to investigate the variation regarding language, section, newspaper and period. Results point to majority of objective leads, especially in Portuguese. American leads present a variation related to the period of production, intergenre leads being the most frequent during the post-September 11 period. Comparative analysis of American and Brazilian leads shows that leads vary according to the section to which they are written. There is predominance of objective leads in the Business section, while Sports and Culture present more variety. There were also differences between Portuguese and English leads regarding the length of the leads.