This blog's recent exercise in summarizing topical headlines from a variety of Internet news sites has been very educational. Since most Americans never read news further than the actual headline, the authors of these blurbs are often more influential than the reporters or opinion columnists themselves. As these headline crafters are not necessarily accomplished journalists, their influence is often disproportionate to their talents. As a consequence, there are characteristics and lessons that were revealed to your humble blogger during this headline gleaning process. Let me offer here a few of these lessons learned:
- Good headline writers capture the essence of the referenced story in as few words as possible without causing confusion or referencing obscurities. A little humor sometimes helps. Very few Internet news sites have high quality headline writers ... The Drudge Report and Politico are recommended.
- Opinion-piece, but not necessarily news-article writers should be allowed to compose their own headlines for the reasons suggested above.
- Often on-line headlines are crafted in a way to get the reader to click through to the body of the article ... which often is where the lucrative advertising revenue is generated. In dead-tree headlines this is not the case as the story itself sits right below the headline and the ads are also within eyesight.. Therefore on-line headline writers use tricks to get click-throughs ... such as ending with question marks or ellipses (...). (A talk-radio host here in Boston suggests that the yes-no answer to any headline that ends in a question mark should be "No".)
- Another headline-writing ruse is to make a leading declarative statement that begs further clarification or details. This exercise in purposeful vagueness was a disqualified in my blog headline picking process.
- On-line headline writers can add emphasis to their work by making their text bold or changing its colors. But, alternatively, newspapers can run banner headlines challenging the text size range of the Internet.
- Unfortunately, there are many headlines that bear little or no relation to the underlying story ... or take some minor point and promote it to the gist of the article or column. Very often this misdirection is reflective of the political bent of publisher or website. Or, even worse, both the article and headline are both fake news ... a very unfortunate journalistic trend.
- One of the advantages of on-line headlines is that they can include or point to an image or even a relevant video or gif format... shades of the newspapers in Harry Potter movies. These moving images can amplify or even obviate the need to read the actual article.
Bottom Line: You can learn an awful lot of what is going on in the world just by reading the headlines on a wide variety of Internet sites ... sometimes even without taking the click bait.
