The headline is the text indicating the content or nature of the article below it, typically by providing a form of brief summary of its contents.
The large type front page headline did not come into use until the late 19th century when increased competition between led to the use of attention-getting headlines.
It is sometimes termed a news hed, a deliberate misspelling that dates from production flow during hot type days, to notify the composing room that a written note from an editor concerned a headline and should not be Typesetting.[ NY Times: On Language: HED]
Headlines in English often use a set of grammatical rules known as headlinese, designed to meet stringent space requirements by, for example, leaving out forms of the verb "to be" and choosing short verbs like "eye" over longer synonyms like "consider".
Production
A headline's purpose is to quickly and briefly draw attention to the story. It is generally written by a
copy editor, but may also be written by the writer, the page layout designer, or other editors. The most important story on the front page above the fold may have a larger headline if the story is unusually important.
The New York Times 21 July 1969 front page stated, for example, that "MEN WALK ON MOON", with the four words in gigantic size spread from the left to right edges of the page.
In the United States, headline contests are sponsored by the American Copy Editors Society, the National Federation of Press Women, and many state press associations; some contests consider created content already published,[A NYTimes contest to write a NYPost-style headline]
Typology
Research in 1980 classified newspaper headlines into four broad categories: questions, commands, statements, and explanations. Advertisers and marketers classify advertising headlines slightly differently into questions, commands, benefits, news/information, and provocation.
Research
A study indicates there has been a substantial increase of sentiment negativity and decrease of emotional neutrality in headlines across written popular U.S.-based
news media since 2000.
Another study concluded that those who have gained the most experience with reading newspapers "spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines—rather than reading all the stories".
Headlines can bias readers toward a specific interpretation and readers struggle to update their memory in order to correct initial misconceptions in the cases of misleading or inappropriate headlines.
One approach investigated as a potential countermeasure to online misinformation is "attaching warnings to headlines of news stories that have been disputed by third-party fact-checkers", albeit its potential problems include e.g. that false headlines that fail to get tagged are considered validated by readers.
Criticism
Sensationalism, inaccuracy and misleading headlines
"Slam"
The use of "slam" in headlines has attracted criticism on the grounds that the word is overused and contributes to media
sensationalism.
The violent imagery of words like "slam", "blast", "rip", and "bash" has drawn comparison to professional wrestling, where the primary aim is to titillate audiences with a conflict-laden and largely predetermined narrative, rather than provide authentic coverage of spontaneous events.
Crash blossoms
"Crash blossoms" is a term used to describe headlines that have unintended ambiguous meanings, such as
The Times headline "Hospitals named after sandwiches kill five". The word 'named' is typically used in headlines to mean "blamed/held accountable/named in",
but in this example it seems to say that the hospitals' names were related to sandwiches. The headline was subsequently changed in the electronic version of the article.
The term was coined in August 2009 on the Testy Copy Editors
web forum after the
Japan Times published an article entitled "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms"
(since retitled to "Violinist shirks off her tragic image").
Headlinese
Headlinese is an abbreviated form of
News style used in
newspaper headlines.
[ Headlinese Collated definitions via www.wordnik.com] Because space is limited, headlines are written in a compressed
Telegram style, using special syntactic conventions,
[ Isabel Perez.com: "Newspaper Headlines"] including:
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Zero copula and articles ( a, an, the) are usually omitted.
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Most are in the simple present tense, e.g. "Governor signs bill", while the future is expressed by an infinitive, with to followed by a verb, as in "Governor to sign bill"
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The conjunction "and" is often replaced by a comma, as in "Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap".
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Individuals are usually specified by surname only, with no .
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Organizations and institutions are often indicated by metonymy: "Wall Street" for the US financial sector, "Whitehall" for the UK government administration, "Madrid" for the government of Spain, "Davos" for World Economic Forum, and so on.
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Many , including contractions and acronyms, are used: in the UK, some examples are Lib Dems (for the Liberal Democrats), Tory (for the Conservative Party); in the US, Dems (for "Democrats") and GOP (for the Republican Party, from the nickname "Grand Old Party"). The period (full point) is usually omitted from these abbreviations, though U.S. may retain them, especially in all-caps headlines to avoid confusion with the word us.
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Lack of a terminating full stop (period) even if the headline forms a complete sentence.
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Use of Quotation mark to indicate a claim or allegation that cannot be presented as a fact. For example, an article titled "Ultra-processed foods 'linked to cancer covered a study which suggested a link but acknowledged that its findings were not definitive.
Some periodicals have their own distinctive headline styles, such as Variety and its entertainment-jargon headlines, most famously "Sticks Nix Hick Pix".
Commonly used short words
To save space and attract attention, headlines often use extremely short words, many of which are not otherwise in common use, in unusual or idiosyncratic ways:
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ace (a professional, especially a member of an elite sports team, e.g. "England ace")
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axe (to eliminate)
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bid (to attempt)
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blast (to heavily criticize)
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cagers (basketball team – "cage" is an old term for indoor court)
[ "When the Court was a Cage" , Sports Illustrated]
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chop (to eliminate)
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coffer(s) (a person or entity's financial holdings)
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confab (a meeting)
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eye (to consider)
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finger (to accuse, blame)
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fold (to shut down)
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gambit (an attempt)
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hail (to praise, welcome)
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hike (to increase, raise)
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ink (to sign a contract)
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jibe (an insult)
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laud (to praise)
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lull (a pause)
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mar (to damage, harm)
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mull (to contemplate)
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nab (to acquire, arrest)
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nix (to reject)
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parley (to discuss)
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pen (to write)
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probe (to investigate)
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quiz (to question, interrogate)
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rap (to criticize)
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romp (an easy victory or a sexual encounter)
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row (an argument or disagreement)
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rue (to lament)
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see (to forecast)
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slay (to murder)
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slam (to heavily criticize)
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slump (to decrease)
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snub (to reject)
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solon (to judge)
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spat (an argument or disagreement)
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spark (to cause, instigate)
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star (a celebrity, often modified by another noun, e.g. "soap opera star")
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tap (to select, choose)
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tot (a child)
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tout (to put forward)
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woe (disappointment or misfortune)
Famous examples
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"Wall Street Lays an Egg" Variety employing the idiom lay an egg (meaning "fail badly") at the height of the Wall Street crash (1929)
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"Sticks Nix Hick Pix" Variety writing that rural moviegoers preferred urban films (1935)
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"Dewey Defeats Truman" Chicago Tribune incorrectly reporting the winner of the U.S. presidential election (1948)
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"" New York Daily News reporting the denial of a federal bailout for bankrupt New York City (1975)
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"Mush from the Wimp" The Boston Globe editorial criticizing statements from then-president Jimmy Carter, added by staff as a joke and mistakenly printed (1980)
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"Headless Body in Topless Bar" New York Post on a local murder (1983)
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"Sick Transit's Glorious Monday" New York Daily News reporting an agreement to avoid public transit fare increases, a pun on the Latin phrase sic transit gloria mundi meaning "thus passes the glory of the world" (1979)
[Daily News (New York), 9/25/1979, p. 1]
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"Gotcha"The UK Sun on the torpedoing of the Argentine ship Belgrano and sinking of a gunboat during the Falklands War (1982)
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"Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster"The UK Sun claiming that the comedian had eaten a fan's pet hamster in a sandwich, later proven false (1986)
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"Great Satan Sits Down with the Axis of Evil" The Times (UK) on US–Iran talks (2007)
[
]
Great Satan sits down with the Axis of Evil
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"Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic are Atrocious" Sun on Caley Thistle beating Celtic F.C. in the Scottish Cup, a pun on supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (2000)
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"We are Pope!" (in German: ) – Bild on the election of Pope Benedict XVI, a German (2005)
In 1986, The New Republic editor Michael Kinsley held a contest to find the most boring newspaper headline after seeing "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative" over a New York Times column by Flora Lewis.
On 22 June 1978, The Guardian ran an article with the headline "Foot hits back on Nazi comparison".
See also
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A-1 Headline, a 2004 Hong Kong film
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Bus plunge, a type of news story, and accompanying headline
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Copy editing
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Corporate jargon
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Crosswordese, words common in crosswords that are otherwise rarely used
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Ellipsis (linguistics), omission of words
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Headlines (from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno)
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Lead paragraph
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Syntactic ambiguity, leads to multiple humorous possible alternative interpretations of written headline
Works cited
news headlines Headlines
Further reading
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Harold Evans (1974). News Headlines (Editing and Design : Book Three) Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd.
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Fritz Spiegl (1966). What The Papers Didn't Mean to Say. Scouse Press, Liverpool
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Mårdh, Ingrid (1980); Headlinese: On the Grammar of English Front Page headlines; "Lund studies in English" series; Lund, Sweden: Liberläromedel/Gleerup;
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Biber, D. (2007); "Compressed noun phrase structures in newspaper discourse: The competing demands of popularization vs. economy"; in W. Teubert and R. Krishnamurthy (eds.); Corpus linguistics: Critical concepts in linguistics; vol. V, pp. 130–141; London: Routledge
External links
