Writing creative headlines: Twitter saves the day

Writing headlines is an art.
We all have memorable ones lodged in our journalistic (sub)conscious. My own personal favorite at the moment is from the South African "Daily Sun" :  Evil cows ate my garden.

A lot has been written about how headlines that work on paper will not work on the web. Amy Gahran, Jakob Nielsen, New.Journalism.Review, Paul Bradshaw et al have written on this. The consensus seems to be (and I agree) that as search engines are such an important driver of traffic to sites then headlines need to be formed in such a way that they give important geographic, subject and object information. Readers tend to scan rather than read, look for names of places rather than puns on places and may not be up on local slang. As Harald Evans wrote: "writing good headlines is 50% of the text editors' skills".

This is where some of the problems arise. In the courses i give there is inevitably quite a bit of push back to this. There is a fear that one of the few areas of joyous creativity in a subs daily routine will disappear. The ability to craft a punny headline is a hallmark of a brilliant sub. If headlines have now to be so prosaic that they will appeal to the pragmatic algorithms of the search engine, then wont that mean that the art will wither and die? It is an argument I can understand (though not agree with). But different platforms need different vocabularies.

And here's the thing. Services like Twitter and Jaiku and others are not the web. They are not search engine dependent. They are more emotional and less analytic. Because you chose to follow to a particular entity (person or service) then the context is already given. So witty headlines will work. Not only will they work, they will be appreciated as the short verse poetry they could be.

So subs, sharpen your similes, ramp up your rhetoric, mix your metaphors and get in the game. We need you. We want you.

 

Comments

[Steve Hill]

Great post. Are online journalists turning into drones and slaves to Google? The design of our site demands that headlines are no more than three words followed by a taster of no more than one sentence in length?

In the case of BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk/news) the first half of the story must be self-contained and written in a format that Ceefax [teletext] can reproduce.

In a way this is 'journalism by numbers', but I don't know if this equates to a deskilling of the core skills

[Paul Bradshaw]

I recently read that punny headlines only really began in the '60s anyway, so why are we so attached to them? And how many are genuinely entertaining rather than groanworthy?

[David Black]

Good points. Still think that Twitter is missing the context of the rest of the printed page that makes some of the cleverest newspaper headlines work so well.

Just as web headlines have been developing a style unique from that of their print cousins, will be interesting to see how this evolves on Twitter.

[Amy Gahran]

Good points, Mark

Just one minor quibble. You wrote: "Services like Twitter and Jaiku and others are not the web. They are not search engine dependent."

I can't speak to jaiku, but I would disagree with that regarding Twitter. Every tweet posted to a non-protected account gets its own permalink, like this:

http://twitter.com/agahran/statuses/775925646

...That content gets indexed by search engines. I've seen tweets showing up in my google queries, and I'm getting traffic from tweets to contentious.com

Hashtags is another way this happens.

Doesn't undermine your point, of course -- just something to consider.

- Amy Gahran