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."'"

Comments

Completely WRONG direction to take.

[tinkertim]

Used to be to start a fire you took two sticks of about the same size and .....

We don't do that anymore. Just like companies that hope to market their news agencies have got to stop depending on search engines to reel in traffic. The sites that attract visitors through searches and make revenue by serving ads are established and have consumed the available market share.

To be successful doing what they do, one of them has to go under right around the time you have something similar already seeding in search engines. Its quite a long waiting list folks.

If you want to reach a niche news market you need to hit people during rush hour in their cars with radio advertisements, or find another way of luring them to your site and when they arrive your titles had better not be crafted for Google.

Look at the explosion of over a million .eu domains, many of which are going to be those article-wiki type affiliate marketing sites and search engines are already crawling them. Sorry guys, but the days of putting up hundreds of pages of content and waiting for Google to do your marketing are gone.

Don't re-write the titles, take the hint that what you're doing just isn't working. Either change your marketing strategy or re-evaluate the fiscal sanity of continuing to publish.

Insanity is doing the same thing over, and over and over again yet expecting different results. The market is flooded - get creative in your advertising and MORE creative with your content and you may enjoy some success. Otherwise the sad fact is .. nobody is going to find you.

Go take a look at shitlance and search for "need articles, need articles re-written, SEO content author". Trying to succeed doing what they're doing is like punching yourself in the nuts until you pass out.

Completely *wrong* direction, imho.

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[nacturation]

It used to be that to get modded up you could read the article leisurely, understand what it's talking about, and then post your comment at any time... letting the merit of what you wrote stand on its own.

We don't do that anymore. These days, users become subscribers so that they can get first post and fool the moderators into thinking that what they wrote was insightful. Rather than discuss, as mentioned in the article, how a witty title that perhaps employs humor or puns is rewritten to something mundane so that a search engine can pick up on common keywords, people these days are engaging in what Linus Torvalds calls little more than a public wanking session trying to post comments more insightful than the rest.

Don't try for first post. Instead, take the hint that your posts just aren't really all that informative nor insightful and re-evaluate the sanity of continuing to post such drivel. Go take a look at comments like this and realize that trying to succeed with content like that is like punching moderators in the nuts trying to get excellent karma.

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[kfg]

Used to be to start a fire you took two sticks of about the same size and .....

then went looking for someone who actually knew how to start a fire, with two appropriately different sized sticks.

KFG

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[Dun Malg]

Used to be to start a fire you took two sticks of about the same size and .....

then went looking for someone who actually knew how to start a fire, with two appropriately different sized sticks.

Surely the second part of his unfinished sentence was: "...and bang them together while shouting 'someone give me matches!'"

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[tbo]

It used to be that to get modded up you could read the article leisurely, understand what it's talking about, and then post your comment at any time... letting the merit of what you wrote stand on its own.

We don't do that anymore

Why the hell was this modded as a troll? Granted, nacturation hasn't been around that long (hah! I mock your six-digit user ID), but he does seem to have hit the nail on the head with the extra big hammer.

I know I've been guilty of replying to the first highly-modded comment, even though my reply had nothing to do with that comment, simply because that increased my visibility to moderators. I know I've been lazy as a moderator on occasion, and blown my mod points on the first half-decent posts I found when browsing "Oldest first". I have sinned myself, and so I know there is truth in what nacturation says.

I hit the karma cap many years ago, and they now no longer even display its numeric value, so I can hardly see the point in continuing with such foolishness. Still, the way slashdot is set up encourages such things. What's the point in posting a comment if nobody will read it? Since the number of readers depends on the comment's score, which depends on how appealing it is to moderators and how early it was posted, we get these types of abuses.

We'd probably be better off with a system where moderators were forced to browse at -1, newest first, and where early posts received a karma penalty unless they achieved a sufficiently high score in moderation. I don't see it happening, though.

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[rolfwind]

I think we'd be better off with a digg type system - anybody can upgrade or downgrade a comment. Comments have bigger or lower threshholds - -25 to +100 or something. Not every post downgraded should be consider crap, make browsing -4 and above default.

I like digg style moderation better, it's more spur of the moment - I can sit there and say "wow, that was a good comment" or "that was really stupid" and assign a plus or minus point without hassle and spontaneously, when I feel like it.

With /.'s system, everytime I have mod points, alway assigned to me when there are no decent article I like or don't feel like grading shit, I feel like a $8 an hour data entry clerk monkey or a middle school teach, trying to assign grades to the first f-ing posts I read to get it out of the way and not to "lose" my points.

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[Ru55el]

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.

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[pla]

Any suggestions we try and break the mold and develop relations with the press to obtain credible editorial are laughed at.

Of course they laugh at you for such suggestions!

I really don't see the problem here... If the topic involved writers of fiction, writers of poetry, some form of "artistic" endeavor, I would say that writing-to-Google could destroy it.

But the topic does NOT involve "art", it involves NEWS. Writers (supposedly) of "fact".

If Google forces every journalist on the planet to stop thinking themselves "cute", if it finally and fully destroys the abomination of filler they call "human interest", if it means I can read a story about a dead cat and not mistake it for a physics pun (or vice-versa), I applaud the change Google has forced on journalists!


My advice - Don't fight a positive change for your profession. Embrace it. Google has made it possible for anyone with an interest in your story, whether you write for the NYT or the East Nowhere Gazette, to find and read your words. It has also, as a POSITIVE side effect, forced you to stick to the point and not assume airs that you create some form of art. It even makes basic fact-checking a 30-second (rather than all day) task.

You can either use all of that to your benefit, or complain that it forces you to do your job better. But whichever you choose, keep in mind that Google has also lowered the bar for entry - Any of a million bloggers could (though you can take comfort that very few do) decide to post about something more interesting than what Sam said Hunter did to Crystal and how much it pissed off Joey.

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[nutshell42]

Absolutely not.

If I look at digg, the percentage of idiotic, flamebait and stupid-but-common-misconception posts that are modded up and of witty, insightful and thought-provoking posts that are modded down is disheartening.

Yes there are stupid mods on /.; a number of my posts have been modded down because the mod simply didn't know what he was doing or because he had an ax to grind (or modded up for the same reasons =). But overall the situation's much better here especially when the discussion's about things that tend to end in flamewars (Apple, Linux DEs etc =)

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[Ru55el]

As a search engine Google is great. The one beef I have about Google-driven news is in terms of me obtaining credible editorial for my company. I would much rather it was solicited by journo's genuinely interested in what we have to say, and offer, rather than print our PR verbatim. When Joe Bloggs reads a press release in PC Mag he can see it for what it is, just another advertorial. Why should he believe it? Nor do I believe it's an 100% positive change for the profession I am in in as it forces publications to pick up on wire service releases to please the advertisers; not the man in the street. While that may bring home the bacon for one and all it certainly stifles investigative journalism, which means the man in the street - while happy to be fed kittypoo all day long - is left in the dark as to what is going on under his nose.

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[Scrameustache]

I think that disagreeing with someone is a perfectly good reason to mod someone down. In fact, when it comes down to it, that's the only criterion you can really have.

Really not! You can find the information to be unrealiable, you undo an 'informative' moderation. Or you notice a redundent post, you cull the posts. Stuff like that.
Trying to silence the voices of those you don't agree with isn't a perfectly good way to use moderation points.

Being modded down is criticism, not censorship.

No, THIS is criticism.
Modding down someone into the noise of the crowd IS censorship. You're trying to make it as hard as possible for people to get to the comment you disagree with by hiding it in a bunch of idiotic trolls, flameguerillas and spams..

Yeah, when I mod down a troll, I act as censor (2nd def.). I'm fine with that, not everythng that is said deserves to be heard... unless you want to.

Maybe I should apply to be a journalist

[jpopper]

I'm boring, straight to the point, and can't be creative even if my life was on the line. Hire me!

Maybe this ain't so bad

[TopShelf]

Personally, I can think of nothing that would improve newspapers more than getting rid of those idiotic puns often seen in headlines...

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[Shimdaddy]

Idiotic puns? The English language is a beautiful one and not everything is about efficiency, speed and clarity. If it were, we'd all read dictionaries for fun and teach our children Lojban. I, for one, celebrate the wordplay practiced by newspapers and think it's intriguing.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[goldfita]

I agree. It becomes irritating. I just find it amusing that the content on the web is being written for machines instead of the people make the content worth billions of dollars. Content should be made for human consumption, not HAL. Hopefully the bots will get better to the point that it doesn't really matter.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[tuxedobob]

90% of puns are bad.

100% of newspaper puns are bad.

I'd rather read Variances and Zoning Volume XIV.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[onebecoming]

I find the Economist's headlines, subheads, and captions often to be laugh-out-loud funny. The editors there seem to be fond of dry wit and black humo(u)r. I can't be alone in appreciating their work.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[raoul666]

This just reminded me of a story a teacher of mine passed along, which he heard from someone on the staff at a respected big-city newspaper.

Brezhnev, leader of the USSR, had just died, and so the staff of the paper was gathered to write up an article about his life, politics, death, etc. etc. Obviously, this would be front page news. The article was written quickly and easily enough, but the editorial staff argued for over 6 hours straight over whether or not to run it with the headline "HEAD RED DEAD."

Sadly, they decided against it.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[MartinB]

A journalist friend of a friend once made up an entire story about a library in Essex having its book budget cut just so he could use the headline (altogether now...):

BOOK LACK IN ONGAR

While a student, working on the campus newspaper, some anarchists invaded the stage at the student theatre, the Bedlam. This let me write the priceless (to my 20 yo ears) headline:

BEDLAM ANARCHY CHAOS

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[Varitek]

Oh, come on. "Headless body found in topless bar" is a work of genius. "Sick Gloria in transit Monday", also.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[Tim Browse]

I once worked for a Flight Simulator company, who came up with a rather innovative solution to the problem of displaying lights, especially at simulated night-time. The simulators cockpits are basically surrounded by a big curved mirror, onto which the final rasterised image is projected, to give a wraparound view. The projectors were called SPX projectors.

They found that if they just put the lights into the rasterised image that was displayed on the mirror, it looked a bit rubbish - pixelated, aliased etc. So someone came up with the idea of plotting point lights during the flyback period - they could control the beam on the way back to show up to N points of light (by flicking the beam on momentarily). I forget what N was. It looked significantly better, which is important when you're training to fly at night, as pretty much all you can see are landing lights, so you notice if it looks bad.

Anyway, they came up with the term 'calligraphic' to describe this technique - something to with it the beam being used in a more analogue, continuous way, I guess.

The real reason was, of course, so they could give the product this name:

Super Calligraphic Raster SPX Projectors

I apologise on their behalf.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[mykdavies]

On a similar vein, when Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club managed the unlikely feat of beating Celtic 3-1 in February 2000, the Sun headline was:

Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious

This is a good thing

[matt21811]

Witty or sensational headlines don't just deceive search engines.
Human readers can get fooled just as easily. Heres an example:

I was doing research to show that Kryder's Law (a kind of super Moore's Law for hard disks that says bit densities have increased factor of 1000 in 10.5 years meaning a doubling every 13 months) is no longer being achieved by hard drive manufacturers. Instead I discovered that Kryders Law was just a creation of Wikipedia's overenthusiastic editors that misinterpreted a single Scientific American headline. Wikipedia editors accidentally invented the "law", and it isn't even correct.

You can read about it at my site here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/Kryder's.html

The search engines are dong us all a favor getting rid of this problem.

Re:This is a good thing

[ZachPruckowski]

but did you change the wikipedia entry to reflect that? :-) Thanks for pointing it out, I'm headed there now. Mind if I link you on the talk page?

Re:This is a good thing

[David Hume]

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.

Re:This is a good thing

[Fnkmaster]

"Sick Gloria in transit Monday": Don't get it.

This has nothing to do with your knowledge of English and everything to do with your knowledge of Latin. "Sic transit gloria mundi" means "thus passes the glory of the world". It's apparently recited as part of the papal coronation ceremony. Anyway, 98% of Americans would not get this either. But that's not the point - for those who do, it's funny. :)


"Close but no cigar"

Not a pun at all. There's nothing to get here - it's just a saying that means "close, but you missed the target". Either you know what the saying means or not, there's no way to figure it out. Apparently a reference to the mid-1900s practice of giving out cigars as prizes at local fairs for winning contests.

"Foot Heads Arms Body"
This would mean nothing to an American either (well, an American would get the pun value, but not know who Foot was or what Arms Body they were talking about).

"COPS MAKE BUTT-ER KNIFE CON SPREAD 'EM"

This one I didn't get until I looked at the story either, it doesn't really parse even to a well-educated native English speaker. Basically, this pun is only funny even to a native speaker if you know the story behind it (that the con was hiding the butter knife in his butt and the cops had to umm... search his orifices for the knife).

So... give yourself more credit. Most of what you didn't get was pretty much impossible to get, or has nothing to do with the English language. :)

Content

[Dante Shamest]

If a site's content is good, people come regardless.

Slashdot's popularity is an anomaly though...

Revert the Pyramids

[n8k99]

Maybe now the articles will be written in a manner which actually resemble a story rather than having a fistful of facts crammed down your throat in burst of staccato like phrases. It would be quite an innovation for the newspapers to tell stories that make you want to read them rather than wrap your fish. Might even include some room for style to enter into the picture.

Writing for Alta Vista, maybe.

[scaryjohn]

I thought the boring, machine-readable stuff (i.e., not just headlines) was supposed to be in metadata. No need to do a hatchet job on a descriptive or witty title. Of course, I just may be an old codger in Internet time.

What's more, I thought the whole point of Pagerank was to make your page associated with what others think your page is about... that if your obituary about Gene Pitney is entitled "Tulsa star: The life and career of much-loved 1960's singer." it'll show up in a search for Gene Pitney because (hopefully) that string will be indexed from the page body and that as other people associate your page with Pitney — irrespective of the <title> that obituary will float towards the top. And if they use your witty title, not only will you get more popular for "Gene Pitney", but also "Tulsa Star" as well.

But there are unwashed masses that do use other search engines, but I thought the last people to rely absolutely on metadata were Alta Vista and WebCrawler.

Re:Creativity in Journalism?

[prockcore]

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.

GOOOOD

[tehwebguy]

the author didn't seem to consider the possibility that readers prefer this..

i personally would rather actually know what articles are about based on their headlines, than be tricked into reading something by a misleading headline. most headlines aren't "creative", so much as they are "dishonest" in the newspaper.

i skim through my university's paper every other week, and i usually am reminded why i don't read it more often.

Google will blacklist you for that.

[YesIAmAScript]

That's in essence what happened to BMW.

Google doesn't like you presenting different data to their search engine than the user would find if they visited. And I can easily see why. Sites would abuse the heck out of it.

See this link amongst many.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4685750.stm

Direct, Content Relevant Headlines Are Good

[Soong]

(notice my to-the-point headline)

Really, not only is it good for search engines, it's good for my brain's relevance filter for trying to see if I care about the story the headline points to.

Re:Two headlines?

[Anthony Boyd]

Would it be that hard to develop a standard (perhaps much like meta-tagging), giving one set of data easily digestible by the bots (and not displayed to the human reader), while retaining an entertaining writing style for human consumption?

That won't ever happen (or more precisely, if it ever happens, it will fail). The problem is that we've done that before with the meta tags you mentioned. See what the SEO world has to say about them (summary: they're nearly useless now). Here's the deal. Any time you create a system for someone to deliver one thing to search engines and another thing to humans, what happens is a small group of opportunists will create massively spammy porn pages for human viewing, while making the search-engine content about every popular topic under the sun. You'll see a headline-made-for-Google which reads, "Britney Spears on Will and Grace" but when you click it, the headline-for-humans reads, "3 lesbian midgets have a pee party!"

Re:Two headlines?

[tbo]

Would it be that hard to develop a standard (perhaps much like meta-tagging), giving one set of data easily digestible by the bots (and not displayed to the human reader), while retaining an entertaining writing style for human consumption?

As another poster pointed out, something like this is already possible, via CSS and/or meta tags. The problem is that the system gets abused. Scammers will feed "NATALIE PORTMAN NAKED AND PETRIFIED" or some other high-demand content as the headline to Google, while hapless human users get to see Cialis ads and penis enlargement spam. Naturally, search engine designers know about this and use countermeasures to punish sites that send different content to webcrawlers and users, on the assumption that such tricks are usually employed for malicious purposes. The collateral damage is any site that actually has a legitimate reason to serve different content to webcrawlers than to users.

I know from personal experience that designing for Google has had a negative impact on the aesthetics of my wife's website. Some might argue that designing for Google usually results in a "slimmer" design with more text and less unnecessary images, but when your website is about something visual (say, art), that can be counterproductive. Also, making a (visual) art site have better support for screenreaders seems kind of pointless, and maybe even cruel. What would the ALT tags say? "A really nice painting--too bad you can't see it".

Re:Isn't there a way...

[NetSettler]

I can use CSS to give the tag an image, and shift the plain-text version of the content off to the side so it doesn't appear on graphical browsers

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.)

Not about search engines

[JanneM]

This is really only tangentially about search engines. It's really about people finding things by searching, rather than by browsing, today.

It used to be a potential reader would be standing in front of a magazine stand, or leafing idly through a newspaper. To grab that reader, a witty, slightly hard-to-understand headline was great - it catches your attention and makes you at least look closer since you want to know what that mysterious piece is actually about. And thus you made the single-copy sale, and perhaps, in time, sold a subrscription.

Today we increasingly don't start by picking up a paper and looking within for what we want; we find things by searching for what we want and end up on anyone of a large number of newspapers and magazine sites. The choice of paper isn't the start of the process - the search is. And when we search, that witty off-color headline is going to mislead us since it doesn't actually contain the key terms that would indicate relevance. Making headlines and summaries clear, straight and to the point isn't about pandering to search engines, but of adjusting to the changing behavior of the readership.

It's the reader behavior that has changed. The search engine angle is just a smokescreen.

Why are so many people threatened by puns?

[nugneant]

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?

good

[penguin-collective]

Newspapers should focus on the news. Unfortunately, ours are trying to provide entertainment, sensationalism, titillation, thrills, and witticisms. Lets hope that, after the gimmicky double-entendre headlines are gone, we can also get rid of these other misfeatures of journalism. And, yes, the NYT is one of the biggest offenders.

Re:Isn't there a way...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

There is an even better method for keeping witty headlines *and* be ranked in top position with google : pr0n. Here are some sample headlines :

- UN concerned about Iraq and free hentai
- Pope Benedict XVI replaces John Paul II in bondage
- France strikers and Natalie Portman arrested

Re:Creativity in Journalism?

[mashade]

I don't really mind drab headlines as long as the point is clear. What really gets my goat are authors that think they're being clever when they twist a headline's grammar simply to insert that lovely pause -- the comma -- thus saving a word or two.

You've all seen it before, but for example:

In house, wife murders husband

By all, a good time had

On spring break, not taking it Easy

I couldn't think of many good examples, (the last is taken from washingtonpost.com) but I'm sure you see my point. Why bother? It sounds dumb. It looks dumb. And in the case of my silly examples above, doesn't even save a character.

Stop twisting the headlines to make them sound like bad headlines.

Wit is good; puns are fine. God dammit, make it readable!

-- Shade

God forbid...

[severoon]

...anyone should be able to read a headline and quickly get an idea of what the story's about. Much better to have some snarky news editor misleading us to get us to read their stupid story.

I, for one, welcome "boring, straightforward" news headlines. After all, it's news. Not commentary, not opinion. If I see a newspaper section marked "Scene" I'm not likely to know what it's about.

Re:God forbid...

[Angostura]

First off, someone is confusing "section headings" and "headlines". Second you are conflating misleading, confusing headlines with ones that use language imaginatively.

I've written some headlines in my time; getting something to fit to the page, convey the meaning and (hopefully) be elegant is an art. The occasional pun is no bad thing.

I remember the story of a UK national newspaper sub-seditor who had a headline all made up in hot metal which sat above his head for on a wall for years on the off-chance that the suitable event occurred. It never did.

The event? He wanted Michael Foot (labour party leader) to be put in charge of the organisation monitoring IRA decommissioning.

The headline?

Foot Heads Arms Body.

Ah well.

Re:God forbid...

[hotdiggitydawg]

My personal favourite was the one about the psychic dwarf that escaped from a mental asylum. It read "Small Medium at Large"...

He Must Have Been A Jounalist

[LowlyWorm]

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good

--Lau Tsu

The Guardian ...

[Tim Ward]

... has the worst puns and is the best online newspaper ...