How popular is the word ‘Lede’? Why should it be ‘Political Ledes,’ not ‘Political Catches / Leads ’?

I noticed that there is a column called the day of the week’s ‘Political Ledes’ written by Mark Halperin in Time magazine. Today’s (August 17) ‘Political Ledes’ picks up headlines of

New York Times: “Romney Says He Paid at Least 13% in Income Taxes”

Washington Post: “Obama Steps Up Portrayal of Romney, Ryan as Out of Touch with Middle America”

Wall Street Journal: “Campaigns Seek Positives in Negative Tone,” and three other news sources.

As I was unfamiliar with the word, ‘Lede’ I checked Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, and Oxford online dictionary. Only Merriam-Webster registers ‘lede’ with the definition - ‘the introductory section of a news story that is intended to entice the reader to read the full story’.

Google Ngram registers both ‘lede’ and ‘ledes.’ The usage of ‘lede’ continues to decline from the peak during 1840 – 1860, while the latter has been also consistently declining after the peak of usage during 1920 -1980.

Isn’t ‘lede’ an outdated word, or still is popular?

The choice of word of course belongs to the taste and up to the freedom of authors, but I wonder why the Time magazine is using ‘”Political ‘Ledes’” which isn’t registered in neither Cambridge or Oxford English Dictionary instead of simply saying “‘Political ‘Leads, (or Catches)’” which I think is easier to understand and is more current.

MicroSoft spell-checker keeps urging me to correct the spelling of ‘lede’ at this very moment I’m typing this question.

As the NYTimes.com blog The Lede explains:

Lede derives from an intentional misspelling of the word “lead” (“lede” rhymes with “breed”), which developed in the newspaper industry to avoid confusion with the kind of metal used in printing presses (“lead” rhymes with “bread”). The lede of a newspaper’s front page is the main story; the lede of an article is the way it begins: the statement of facts or the anecdote that the writer lays out to lead readers into a story.

It's a term specific to journalism, the newspaper industry in particular.

Of the 11 instances of lede that show up in the Corpus of Contemporary American English that aren't someone's name (belonging to one Cliff Lede), all are journalistic references from newspapers or news magazines.

I consider lede journalism jargon. It is not popular in the public. They're probably using it to show that they're taking the main points of numerous news stories. Lede is defined, as you said, as the introductory section of a news story that is intended to pique the reader's interest so he or she reads the entire story.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, lede may have been used "to distinguish this sense from other possible meanings of the word, perhaps especially the molten lead used in typesetting machines."

I first encountered "lede" on English Wikipedia, where some prominent editors and editing tools/scripts even use the term. Nonetheless, I've noticed that most Wikipedians tend to be unfamiliar with it, and there's been plenty of discussion on Wikipedia about it, e.g. Talk:Lead Paragraph and Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section . If you read through it all (phew!), you'll find that "lede" is definitely not popular.