The headline 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 type front page headline did not come into use until the late 19th century when increased competition between newspapers led to the use of attention-getting headlines.
It is sometimes termed a news hed, a deliberate misspelling that dates from production flow during hot type days, to notify the composing room that a written note from an editor concerned a headline and should not be set in type. [1]
Headlines in English often use a set of grammatical rules known as headlinese , 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 a copy editor, but may also be written by the writer, the page layout designer, or other editors. The most important story on the front page above 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 the American Copy Editors Society, the National 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]
A study indicates there has been a substantial increase of sentiment negativity and decrease of emotional neutrality in headlines across written popular U.S.-based news media since 2000. [8] [7]
Skilled[ clarify ] newspaper readers "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 potential countermeasure 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]
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The use of "slam" in headlines has attracted criticism on the grounds that the word is overused and contributes to media sensationalism. [12] [13] The violent imagery of words like "slam", "blast", "rip", and "bash" has drawn comparison to professional 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 as The 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 to remove the ambiguity. [16] The term was coined in August 2009 on the Testy Copy Editors web forum [17] after the Japan Times published an article entitled "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms" [18] (since retitled to "Violinist shirks off her tragic image"). [19]
Headlinese is an abbreviated form of news writing style used in newspaper headlines. [20] Because space is limited, headlines are written in a compressed telegraphic style, using special syntactic conventions, [21] including:
Some periodicals have their own distinctive headline styles, such as Variety 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] [30]
Some famous headlines in periodicals include:
The New Republic editor Michael Kinsley began a contest to find the most boring newspaper headline. [38] According to him, no entry surpassed the one that had inspired him to create the contest: "WORTHWHILE CANADIAN INITIATIVE", [39] over a column by The New York Times' Flora Lewis. [40] In 2003, New York Magazine published a list of eleven "greatest tabloid headlines". [41]
The New York Times (NYT) is a national daily newspaper based in New York City. A newspaper of record, it is the second-largest newspaper by circulation and one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States. The New York Times is published by the The New York Times Company, a publicly traded company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, including its current chairman and the paper's publisher, A. G. Sulzberger. The Times is headquartered at the The New York Times Building in Manhattan. The New York Times covers domestic, national, and international news, and comprises opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews.
Yellow journalism and yellow press are American terms for journalism and associated newspapers that present little or no legitimate, well-researched news while instead using eye-catching headlines for increased sales. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.
A broadsheet is the largest newspaper format and is characterized by long vertical pages, typically of 22.5 inches (57 cm). Other common newspaper formats include the smaller Berliner and tabloid–compact formats.
The New York Post is an American conservative daily tabloid newspaper published in New York City. The Post also operates three online sites, NYPost.com, PageSix.com, a gossip site, and Decider.com, an entertainment site.
News style, journalistic style, or news-writing style is the prose style used for news reporting in media, such as newspapers, radio and television.
The Daily Mirror is a British national daily tabloid newspaper. Founded in 1903, it is owned by parent company Reach plc. From 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was simply The Mirror. It had an average daily print circulation of 716,923 in December 2016, dropping to 587,803 the following year. Its Sunday sister paper is the Sunday Mirror. Unlike other major British tabloids such as The Sun and the Daily Mail, the Mirror has no separate Scottish edition; this function is performed by the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail, which incorporate certain stories from the Mirror that are of Scottish significance.
In journalism and mass media, sensationalism is a type of editorial tactic. Events and topics in news stories are selected and worded to excite the greatest number of readers and viewers. This style of news reporting encourages biased or emotionally loaded impressions of events rather than neutrality, and may cause a manipulation to the truth of a story. Sensationalism may rely on reports about generally insignificant matters and portray them as a major influence on society, or biased presentations of newsworthy topics, in a trivial, or tabloid manner, contrary to general assumptions of professional journalistic standards.
Journalese is the artificial or hyperbolic, and sometimes over-abbreviated, language regarded as characteristic of the news style used in popular media. Joe Grimm, formerly of the Detroit Free Press, likened journalese to a "stage voice": "We write journalese out of habit, sometimes from misguided training, and to sound urgent, authoritative and, well, journalistic. But it doesn't do any of that."
The National Enquirer is an American tabloid newspaper. Founded in 1926, the newspaper has undergone a number of changes over the years.
Newsday is an American daily newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, although it is also sold throughout the New York metropolitan area. The slogan of the newspaper is "Newsday, Your Eye on LI", and formerly it was "Newsday, the Long Island Newspaper". The newspaper's headquarters is in Melville, New York, in Suffolk County. Newsday has won 19 Pulitzer Prizes and has been a finalist for 20 more.
Today was a national newspaper in the United Kingdom that was published between 1986 and 1995.
Mumbai Mirror was an English-language newspaper that was initially launched in 2005 by the Times Group as part of a ringfencing tactic to fight emerging competition in the city, mainly from Zee–Bhaskar's then joint newspaper, Daily News and Analysis. Mumbai Mirror was downsized and digitised by its owners at The Times Group on 5 December 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown.
"Sticks Nix Hick Pix" is a famous headline printed in Variety, a newspaper covering Hollywood and the entertainment industry, on July 17, 1935, over an article about the reaction of rural audiences to movies about rural life. Variety was known for its playful use of Broadway and Hollywood jargon to pack as much meaning as possible into a small headline or article; examples include "H'wood" and "biz".
Tabloid journalism is a popular style of largely sensationalist journalism which takes its name from the tabloid newspaper format: a small-sized newspaper also known as half broadsheet. The size became associated with sensationalism, and tabloid journalism replaced the earlier label of yellow journalism and scandal sheets. Not all newspapers associated with tabloid journalism are tabloid size, and not all tabloid-size newspapers engage in tabloid journalism; in particular, since around the year 2000 many broadsheet newspapers converted to the more compact tabloid format.
Libertatea is a Romanian daily newspaper and online news website covering current affairs, entertainment, sports and lifestyle. It was founded on December 22, 1989 (12:45 p.m.), by Octavian Andronic, as "the first independent newspaper of the Romanian Revolution of 1989".
Pipe Dream is the student newspaper of Binghamton University in Vestal, N.Y. Content is published online throughout the week at bupipedream.com, as well as in print every Tuesday.
The Cavalier Daily is an independent, student-run daily news organization at the University of Virginia. Founded in 1890, under the name College Topics, The Cavalier Daily is Virginia's oldest collegiate daily and the oldest daily newspaper in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Alamogordo Daily News, founded in 1898, is a daily newspaper published in Alamogordo, New Mexico, United States. It carries local news as well as syndicated content from Associated Press and others.
The Daily News was a newspaper published in Los Angeles from 1923 to 1954. It was founded in 1923 by Cornelius Vanderbilt IV and bought by Manchester Boddy who operated it through most of its existence.
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