When I started to work for the Prince Albert Daily Herald 45 years ago, most of us in the newsroom had no formal journalism training. Instead, we learned on the job. I had a university degree but it was in science!
Over the years, the several companies who owned the Herald offered in-house training for editorial staff. One of the seminar topics was “headline writing”.
As the headline for this column might suggest, there are several steps involved in writing a headline, not the least of which is understanding what the story is about. If a newspaper story is written properly, the essence of the story should be evident from the first couple of paragraphs.
A good headline should be more than just a label for the story. The headline should be a sentence with nouns verbs and perhaps adjectives or adverbs. Label headlines such as, “the crop report” are frowned upon. The verb in the headline should be active. Rather than saying “man is bitten by a dog” the headline might read “dog mauls, man.”
In the 1990s, we were told to use “sexy” words in our headlines. These words contained the letters, S, X, Y or Z for example. The theory was that “sexy” letters captured the attention of the reader. Today while we scroll through endless trivia on our phones, it is often the headlines that catch our attention, such as “I’ll never do this again! “
In the era before electronic media, readers scanned the newspaper headlines in much the same way as we scan our phones today. The headline had to catch attention to entice the reader to take a few minutes to read the story below it.
Another standard for writing a good headline is that it has to “fit”. If the story is presented across four columns of the newspaper, for example, then the headline should also fit across four columns. \When I started work at the Herald in 1981 headlines were written on a slip of paper that was passed to the typesetters in a different part of the building. In order to determine if the headline would fit the space available for it, each letter was assigned a numerical value. For example, a capital W had a much larger value than a lowercase l. During my first few weeks as an editor, I chewed a lot of pencils while writing those headlines. (I chewed those pencils so fiercely that I gave myself a tremendous pain in the jaw. My dentist created a mouthguard for me to wear until the pain went away.)
During headline writing seminar we also learned that putting numbers in headlines attracted attention. You will see this today in social media where people tell you there are “10 top” something or other. You’ll notice that I use the number six in the headline for this column. It’s a lie. I just used the number six to demonstrate another suggested method for writing headlines … alliteration. Over the years I learned people respond well to headlines that repeat consonants or vowel sounds, hence the use of the words “six sizzling steps”.
So there you have it, the accumulated so-called wisdom of my 29 years as a newspaper editor.
A newspaper headline should be factual, it should be active rather than passive, it should catch the reader’s attention, and sometimes it can be fun!
