Theheadline 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 typefront page headline did not come into use until the late 19th century when increased competition betweennewspapers led to the use of attention-getting headlines.
It is sometimes termed a newshed, a deliberate misspelling that dates from production flow duringhot type days, to notify the composing room that a written note from an editor concerned a headline and should not beset in type.[1]
Headlines in English often use a set of grammatical rules known asheadlinese, 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".
A headline's purpose is to quickly and briefly draw attention to the story. It is generally written by acopy editor, but may also be written by the writer, the page layout designer, or other editors. The most important story on the front pageabove 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 theAmerican Copy Editors Society, theNational 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]
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 ofsentiment negativity and decrease of emotional neutrality in headlines across written popular U.S.-basednews media since 2000.[8][7]
Another study concluded that those who have gained the most experience with reading newspapers "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 potentialcountermeasure 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]
The use of "slam" in headlines has attracted criticism on the grounds that the word is overused and contributes to mediasensationalism.[12][13] The violent imagery of words like "slam", "blast", "rip", and "bash" has drawn comparison toprofessional 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 asThe 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.[16] The term was coined in August 2009 on the Testy Copy Editorsweb forum[17] after theJapan Times published an article entitled "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms"[18] (since retitled to "Violinist shirks off her tragic image").[19]
Headlinese has a long history. This example is the front page of theLos Angeles Herald issue of May 29, 1916.
Headlinese is an abbreviated form ofnews writing style used innewspaper headlines.[20] Because space is limited, headlines are written in a compressedtelegraphic style, using special syntactic conventions,[21] including:
Mostverbs are in thesimple present tense, e.g. "Governor signs bill", while the future is expressed by aninfinitive, withto followed by a verb, as in "Governor to sign bill"
Theconjunction "and" is often replaced by a comma, as in "Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap".[22]
Individuals are usually specified by surname only, with nohonorifics.
Organizations and institutions are often indicated bymetonymy: "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.
Manyabbreviations, includingcontractions andacronyms, are used: in the UK, some examples areLib Dems (for theLiberal Democrats),Tories (for theConservative Party); in the US,Dems (for "Democrats") andGOP (for theRepublican Party, from the nickname "Grand Old Party"). The period (full point) is usually omitted from these abbreviations, thoughU.S. may retain them, especially in all-caps headlines to avoid confusion with the wordus.
Lack of a terminatingfull stop (period) even if the headline forms a complete sentence.
Use ofsingle 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] LinguistGeoffrey 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, henceBetteridge's law of headlines.[23][26]
Some periodicals have their own distinctive headline styles, such asVariety and its entertainment-jargon headlines, most famously "Sticks Nix Hick Pix".
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]
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)[30]
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 theBaltimore 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".[31]
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 phraseSic transit gloria mundi[33]
GOTCHA – The UKSun on the torpedoing of the Argentine shipBelgrano and sinking of a gunboat during theFalklands War (1982)
The New Republic editorMichael Kinsley began a contest to find the most boring newspaper headline.[37] According to him, no entry surpassed the one that had inspired him to create the contest: "WORTHWHILE CANADIAN INITIATIVE",[38] over a column byThe New York Times'Flora Lewis.[39] In 2003,New York Magazine published a list of eleven "greatest tabloid headlines".[40]
^Ecker, Ullrich K. H.; Lewandowsky, Stephan; Chang, Ee Pin; Pillai, Rekha (December 2014). "The effects of subtle misinformation in news headlines".Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.20 (4):323–335.doi:10.1037/xap0000028.PMID25347407.
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
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