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As tempting as the pun might be, it would be bad journalism to refer to this incident as a “brief chase” unless the reporter can verify exactly what kind of attire the suspect was wearing. Verify or Duck. Similar:In December 2001 I was blogging aboutIn December 2001, I was blogging about …AmusingFacebook Axes “Trending” SidebarFacebook…
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Headlines are important. (Send an editor some love.)
If you encounter the same story on different news sites, that does not mean you caught sneaky America-hating fake news “journalists” in the act. A meme I recently encountered shows three slightly different coronavirus headlines, all of which use the phrase “debate begins.” Text shared along with the meme suggests the repetition means the story…
The Society of Professional Journalists links to an interview with an MIT professor who’s studying misinformation on social media (which is not the same thing as bad journalism — some bad actors take journalism out of context in order to deceive). Responsible journalists are aware that sensational headlines can harm the public. The truth is…
Headlines from CNN and Fox shade in different directions, but both articles agree in substance that Trump got a mixed reaction from the “Ultimate Fighting Championship” in New York yesterday. The Fox reporter carefully cites the phrasing of other journalists who saw the reaction as mixed, as opposed the CNN reporter who confidently describes the boos overpowering the cheers.
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When a correspondent sent to Cuba to cover a possible war telegraphed that there would be no war and he wanted to come home, Newspaper mogul Willam Randolph Hearst is said to have replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” It’s a story I remember learning in middle school. …
This morning a journalism student told me a friend in a different class was complaining that “the media” was stigmatizing mental illness in its coverage of yesterday’s mass shooting in California. My student told me she remembered I had mentioned that reporters often don’t write the headlines under which their stories are published, but she…
For the UK Guardian, the news is the words the White House used while accusing Acosta of an action caught on video. For Fox, Sanders was accused of sharing an allegedly “‘doctored’” video of a neutrally-identified “interaction.” For the Washington Post, the White House “shares doctored video” — no accusation, no scare quotes. Read…
If you were this person’s attorney, you’d probably want this social media blurb phrased a little differently. The headline attached to the story is clearer. Yes, the social media blurb is shorter, but I’d rather cut the “Twp” and make room for the unambiguous “and.” Derry man accused of assaulting female witness and attorney jailed…
I already have some handouts on writing titles for web pages and writing titles for college papers. I don’t (at the moment) have a full handout on writing headlines for news stories. In this age of clickbait (“Clickbait Tactics Drive the Writing of Headlines on ABC News,” 2015), revisiting Poynter’s advice on writing traditional news…
My daughter and I were talking about prop newspapers, and she suggested making a newspaper prop with headlines such as “Actors Fail to Distract Audience from Prop Newspaper Headlines” Similar:Kairos: Open Since 1996As a plucky new faculty member I wrote a…AcademiaLawsuit Against Warner/Chappell Music Claims Happy Birthday Belongs to Public Domain20 years ago, I chose for…
I probably should not be surprised, but when I saw this run of several headlines on the ABC News website, I was struck by how deliberately uninformative they are. I added some useful information that could have been in the headline. A print journalist writes a headline for someone who’s already holding the newspaper, so…
Writers make mistakes. That’s why we have editors. But editors make mistakes, too. I don’t know the circumstances behind this particular error, but chances are that the reporter did not write this headline — that would have been the job of whatever local editor decided to reprint the AP story. Similar:Do you really keep a…
This Time magazine article is a good one, but that “what you think you know is wrong” headline is more of the same obnoxious clickbait that the article itself critiques, so here’s a bit of what I found useful. Scrolling is more acceptable behavior than it used to be. We’re all much more used to…
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Headlines once were stuffed full of proper nouns. But it turns out, old-fashioned headlines don’t convey things that aren’t news well. “Three-Legged Dog Desirable”? Nope. It doesn’t work, because there’s nothing there. Nothing except “aww.” And service pieces—how to do x, why not to do y—need the help for their softness too. —The Awl. Similar:A…