Headlines matter. Were they migrants, people who happened to be at a migrant center, pedestrians, or manslaughter victims?
Do the headlines encourage empathy, or do they “other” the victims of crime? (Click to zoom in.)
I assume the police report didn’t specify what kind of underwear, because this headline is crying out for a very obvious pun.
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.
What a fluke (great headline; great story)
Headlines: Why editors matter in journalism.
Headlines are important. (Send an editor some love.)
The phrase “debate begins” in the headlines of multiple stories on coronavirus does not mean sneaky journalists copy-pasted a press release
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…
When People Only Read the Headline — Misuse of Journalism
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…
A tale of two headlines: CNN and Fox shade their reports of UFC crowd’s reaction to Trump
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.
Love This Headline: “He took a date to the park where he was gored by a bison, figuring it wouldn’t happen again. He was wrong.”
Yellow Journalism Did Not Cause the Spanish-American War (Role of Sensationalized Headlines Often Exaggerated)
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. …
My Student Calls Out a Mental Health Stigma in a Biased Headline — But Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Blame “The Media”
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…
A study in breaking news headlines.
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…
Details like headlines matter. Journalists should work hard to avoid being misread.
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…
10 questions to help you write better headlines
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…
Actors Fail to Distract Audience from Prop Newspaper Headlines
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”
Clickbait Tactics Drive the Writing of Headlines on ABC News
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…
Don’t Automatically Blame the Reporter for a Headline Error
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.
Time article with clickbaity headline: Web users annoyed by marketing tricks
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…
xkcd: Headlines
It: nailed. xkcd: Headlines.
I feel juvenile enough today that this headline made me snicker.
Take A Minute To Watch The New Way We Make Web Headlines Now
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.