There are witty and cute headlines. Then there are stupid headlines. Headlines atop a story in a newspaper or magazine often tell us what the article is about. In journalism school we were taught to write headlines in 10 words or less, but now with the magic of the Internet and in particular, blogs, those of us who write them, have to be a little extra creative in order to cleverly grab your attention.
It’s the same thing with the newspaper and magazine industries, as the editing staff must come up clever eye-catching headlines day in, day out in order to sell the product. Besides the gossip-slandering tabloids like The National Enquirer, who have to be even more creative than the established press to sell papers, I believe that perhaps the best and most creative established press editing news staff is those that work for the New York Post, the Chicago Sun-Times & Daily and Weekly Variety.
My personal favorite headline I read when I visited New York City this past spring was in the New York Post which read; “Hi Ho, Hi Ho It’s Off To Court We Go.” The story was about a midget family in the suburbs of New York that was suing neighbors for making fun of them.
In my own hometown, the Chicago Sun-Times as of the past several years also seems to have a fairly creative editing staff that can indeed sell papers. My favorite Chicago Sun-Times headline I saw once, cut out and taped to a wall read; “Air Head To Succeed Resigning Officer.”
Daily & Weekly Variety also write brilliant headlines, including their two most famous offerings; “Hix Nix Stix Pix” and “Wall St. Lays An Egg,” the latter of the two headlines referring to the collapse of the New York stock market prior to the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States.
Even on Yahoo’s website, the teaser headlines are a little too ridiculous at times. My two favorites that I found today were “Fashion Magazines Show More Body Types.” The article itself ended up being about fashion editors who feature plus-size models. If they really wanted to get attention, they should have written something like; “More Fatties Find Forum In Fashion Magazines.”
The other headline I read; “Some Question Third Year Of Law School,” was about an interview with a corporate lawyer who said her third year of law school was fueled by beer and softball, and the “some” in the article boiled to a couple of different spokespersons from varying law schools in the state of Virginia questioning whether or not a third year of law school was necessary or not. Perhaps the headline should have read something like; “Naïve Lawyers Motivated By Softball And Beer In Law School Third Year.”
The late comedian Pigmeat Markham performed a hilarious skit about newspapers in which he met an old friend on the streets of Washington, D.C. who was a reporter for The Washington News, while Pigmeat’s newspaper was called The Washington Booze.
Markham’s newspaper never had time to write lengthy detailed-oriented news articles and instead just wrote headlines, leaving the reader to figure out the rest of the story. A couple of the headlines he employed were; “She Was The Grandmother Of 28, She Could Have Had More, But Now It’s Too Late” and “TV Star, Foot Slip And There You Are.”
In order to get the reader’s attention, when there’s either a disaster, a death or a story of extreme importance, newspapers will often employ the screaming headline effect that is a 72-point head type, although many newspapers seem to abuse the privilege, again just to sell papers.
It’s easy to write headlines it seems all you need to do is think of it as writing comedy with a little common sense mixed in for good measure; for example using words that seem to fit together or words that are the opposite of what is meant as such.
Stories about obesity seem to employ words in the headlines like fat, overweight, chubby, pudgy and big. Stories that involve music use catchy phrases or clichés like “strike up the band,” “strike a chord,” or “music to out ears.” Fashion stories use words like dress-up, dressy, dolled-up, while stories about love use words and phrases like sex appeal or spicy and stories on automobiles or vehicles often use words like driver, driven, racing or flashy. The list goes on but I think you get the idea. Once you write something, you just pull a few bits of information out and write a headline, simple as that!
But headlines do serve a purpose, which of course is to be witty cute and stupid all in the same breath. And that’s about the size of it.
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