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
newspapers 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
set in type.[1]
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's 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.[2]
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,[3] others are for works written with winning in mind.[4]
Typology
Research in 1980 classified newspaper headlines into four broad categories:
questions, commands, statements, and explanations.[5] Advertisers and marketers classify advertising headlines slightly differently into questions, commands, benefits, news/information, and provocation.[6]
Emotionality in news articles headlines since 2000[7]
Average yearly sentiment of headlines across 47 popular news media outlets[7]
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.[8][7]
Skilled[clarify] newspaper readers "spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines—rather than reading [all or most of] the stories".[9]
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.[10]
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.[11]
Criticism
Sensationalism, inaccuracy and misleading headlines
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"Slam"
The use of "slam" in headlines has attracted criticism on the grounds that the word is overused and contributes to media
sensationalism.[12][13] 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.[14]
"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 a lawsuit]",[15] 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 to remove the ambiguity.[16] The term was coined in August 2009 on the Testy Copy Editors
web forum[17] after the Japan Times published an article entitled "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms"[18] (since retitled to "Violinist shirks off her tragic image").[19]
Headlinese is an abbreviated form of
news writing style used in
newspaper headlines.[20] Because space is limited, headlines are written in a compressed
telegraphic style, using special syntactic conventions,[21] including:
Most
verbs 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"
The
conjunction "and" is often replaced by a comma, as in "Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap".[22]
Individuals are usually specified by surname only, with no
honorifics.
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.
Many
abbreviations, including
contractions and
acronyms, are used: in the UK, some examples are Lib Dems (for the
Liberal Democrats), Tories (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.
Lack of a terminating
full stop (period) even if the headline forms a complete sentence.
Use of
single quotation marks 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.[23][24] Linguist
Geoffrey K. Pullum characterizes this practice as deceptive, noting that the single-quoted expressions in newspaper headlines are often not actual quotations, and sometimes convey a claim that is not supported by the text of the article.[25] Another technique is to present the claim as a question, hence
Betteridge's law of headlines.[23][26]
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:[27][28][29][30]
ace (a professional, especially a member of an elite sports team, e.g. "
England ace")
axe (to eliminate)
bid (to attempt)
blast (to heavily criticize)
cagers (basketball team – "cage" is an old term for indoor court)[31]
chop (to eliminate)
coffer(s) (a person or entity's financial holdings)
MUSH FROM THE WIMP – The Boston Globe in-house joke headline for an editorial, which was not changed before 161,000 copies had been printed. Theo Lippman Jr. of the Baltimore Sun declared "Mush from the Wimp" the second most famous newspaper headline of the 20th century, behind "Wall St. Lays an Egg" and ahead of "Ford to City: Drop Dead".[32]
SICK TRANSIT'S GLORIOUS MONDAY – New York Daily News front-page caption on a photo (1979) reporting an agreement to avoid fare increases on city transit services, making a multi-word pun on the Latin phrase
Sic transit gloria mundi[34]
GOTCHA – The UK Sun on the torpedoing of the Argentine ship Belgrano and sinking of a gunboat during the
Falklands War (1982)
The New Republic editor
Michael Kinsley began a contest to find the most boring newspaper headline.[38] According to him, no entry surpassed the one that had inspired him to create the contest: "WORTHWHILE CANADIAN INITIATIVE",[39] over a column by The New York Times'Flora Lewis.[40] In 2003, New York Magazine published a list of eleven "greatest tabloid headlines".[41]
Mårdh, Ingrid (1980); Headlinese: On the Grammar of English Front Page headlines; "Lund studies in English" series; Lund, Sweden: Liberläromedel/Gleerup;
ISBN91-40-04753-9
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
Look up headline in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.