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This Boring Headline is Written for Google
prostoalex writes "The New York Times is running an article on how newspapers around the country find their Web sites more dependent on search engines than before. The unexpected effect? Witty double entendres, allusions and sarcastic remarks are rewritten into boring straight-to-the-point headlines that rank higher on search engines and news-specific search engines. From the article: 'About a year ago, The Sacramento Bee changed online section titles. "Real Estate" became "Homes," "Scene" turned into "Lifestyle," and dining information found in newsprint under "Taste," is online under "Taste/Food."'"
I thought most journalists were already "creative" enough without needing to put miserable puns in their headlines.
Copy editors write the headlines, not journalists. That explains why you get those kitshy headlines in the first place, it's their only creative outlet.
I completely agree with the spirit of your remark insofar as you're suggesting that technology can trivially solve this problem.
Not just for this, but for an international audience generally (many of whom read English but have trouble with idioms, sarcasm, and other advanced usages), it wouldn't hurt to have an XML or HTML markup that is, effectively, the ability to associate a plainer meaning to text for alternate use. A browser could be put in a mode to show the fancy use, show the basic use, or show the fancy use but with plain use pop-ups like tool tips (or plain-use explanation-on-demand-by-right-click). Doing it this way would allow search engines to offer a radio button saying "search idiomatic uses" which was, perhaps, defaultly off, but that could be re-enabled if the witty text was what stuck in your mind.
Good headlines are like good subject lines in mail. One of the best subject lines I ever saw in email was the text "crowbar in head". No, it wasn't about crowbars, it was about a "brain-damaged program" someone was alleged to have written. It might be a bad search keyword if I was searching for info on crowbars literally, but it is very easy for me to find in old mail because it was unique and easy to remember. I would hate to see the net move away from the ability to make useful labels.
I also worked at a company where the User Interface people got overzealous and started to rename all the editor commands from things like "View xxx" and "Show xxx" and "Print xxx" and so on to just "Show xxx" because they thought that was more regular. But at some point someone noticed that the emacs-style command keys like Control-V (formerly mnemonic for View) no longer made sense. Those UI people were soon pejoratively nicknamed the "View Police" because their entire focus seemed to be on stamping out flexible use of language. People started to rightly question whether eliminating all the synonyms in the language was good, because it meant every time you searched for "Show" you got a zillion hits and every time you searched for "View" you got zero. There are times when this is right and times when this is absolutely wrong, but the problem is not fixed by renaming commands. A better fix would be to have search commands that understand likely synoyms and then the option to turn that on and off. I think that lesson might apply here, too.
So I think there's a lot you could do with, for example, an extended USAGE="sarcasm|wit|pun|joke|..." MEANING="this is a rewording" attribute in, for example, a SPAN element of HTML, for example.
What I don't agree with is doing something like making an IMG tag that has sarcasm or wit or whatever in it and then having the ALT attribute for the IMG element use the plain text. The reasons are many, but include such issues as: eventually Google will search text found in images so it's a temporary solution, people on non-image-based browsers (including the sight-impaired) deserve access to wit, and, most fundamentally, the whole point of markup is that it allows a flexible ability to tag things with their true nature. The true nature is not "wit is graphical and plain meaning is text"; that's just a way to shoehorn a solution into existing frameworks.
(If this is not what you meant, then I've misread you and would appreciate a more detailed explanation of what you're going after.)
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
There may be two other factors involved such that the trend to write headlines in this way would remain even if there was no "Google / crawler" bias.
First, I think newspapers on the web have a far broader, and less knoweldgeable (or at least less "locally" knowledgeable) audience than their paper brethren. I know before the web I would read the LA Times (I'm in LA), the NY Times, and *maybe* the Washington Post. Now, I read newspapers from all over the U.S. and the U.S. and the world. In that setting puns, allusions, double entendres, sarcastic remarks, etc. don't work for me. I'm supposed to understand puns in headlines from the Pakistan Times? Sophisticated allusions from the Soweto Daily? I don't think so. Even headlines from Birmingham, Alabama that require I'm knowledgeable about "obvious" local knowledge? No. Just give me a "boring" headline that might catch my interest and that I can understand.
Second, I recently read that English is, or soon will be, the first language in the history of the world where more people speak it as a second language than speak it as their first language. This is expected to have an impact on the evolution of English. I think it will have an effect of "dumbing down" the language on the Net. The New York Times and Chicago Tribune headline writer is now thinking of his audience in Japan, Korea, etc.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I personally like them. Give me some dry wit - or "32 Scoot to Shoot with Plane Aflame" (see comments above) - over a boring summary of the facts any day of the week. Personally, I'm apt to think this is symptomatic of the decay within our society - but then again, I'm apt to think that over the latest Steven Spielberg movie as well, so go figure. Really, it harkens back to a day when those who read the paper, read the entire newspaper, and thusly would know the entire news. The headlines were there more to prepare your mind for the inevitable than to attract the reader's eye. This USA Today trend of posting full color buzzwords on the front page, so Joe Schmoe can skim it and knows what names to drop around the water cooler today, has got to stop.
-1 Flamebait out of the way, it's time to go for my weak attempt at +1 Insightful:
Wouldn't it be relatively simple for Google to allow newspapers the use of "alt" or "meta" tags for their headlines? Considering there's a small, reasonably finite number of trusted news sources, couldn't some sort of whitelist be easily implemented?
Alas I work for a company that SWEARS by Google. GoogleAds get twice my annual salary every month from us and it amounts to... lots of dead leads. A veteran journalist / PRO-writer I am employed to make sure I write all my articles and website pages according to the Google-friendly template drawn up for me by a manager whose home language isn't English. I get crapped on if I deviate from the Holy Template. Any suggestions we try and break the mold and develop relations with the press to obtain credible editorial are laughed at. Of course I am looking for something else but you know what? Every company I try out for asks me the same question: "You can do Google Ads?" It's like the pre-windoze days when all a secretary had to do to get a job was know WordPerfect 5.1 yeesh In closing I recall a discussion I had with a former editor of the Jerusalem Post. He told me that all his jouralists use Google to find leads and implied I was a fool for suggsting otherwise. Investigative reporters have become librarians.