A poem for Monday:
Writing a headline
is like creating Haiku.
It must work - and fit.
Among the hardest jobs at the paper is writing headlines. There’s limited space, both in the number of words available and the width of the columns. Think about it this way. It’s easy to get Bush into a one-column lead headline. Washington would be another matter. And then of course is the real test, balancing truth and seduction. Good headlines inform, attract and entertain. Puns are good when they work. When they don’t, a bad pun headline is like the guest at your party who never leaves.
The Panthers’ loss to the Seahawks yesterday gave a chance for headline writers to strut their stuff. Here are how three newspapers headlined the story, at least in their printed editions.
Winston-Salem Journal: ‘Helpless in Seattle’. Pretty good. Almost as inspired as our infamous DANG headline of two years ago, when the Cats lost in the Super Bowl.
News & Record: West Toast. A little obscure to pick up on the pun, but big and bold and I applaud it. Newspapers don’t use toast in the non-breakfast sense nearly enough.
Charlotte Observer: Seattle Reigns. Dignified. And maybe I’m reading too much into it, but my sense is that head subtly implies that the Panthers didn’t lose so much as Seattle won.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
writing a haiku
about headlines is odd and
somewhat off-putting.
90% of the criticism I hear about the Journal involves the headlines. Many feel who ever stays latest at the paper has to write the hedlines before he/she goes home, so he/she just grabs something from the story, no matter how trivial. Also need improvement in photos, especially sports photos. Someone has an incredeible game and gets the headline and most of the story but the photo is of someone who played for 2 minutes.
Let me take them one at a time.
First, my haiku was just a joke, nothing more. But they are fun to write. And remember, that the proper form is 5 syllables, then 7, then 5 again.
The point with haiku, like a headline, is that precision matters.
I hear what you are saying about the photography, but layout also matters in designing a sports page. Quite often, a photo of a secondary player is simply a better photo than one of the stars of that particular game. It’s great when they match up. For example, I was looking today at a photo from the NCAA tourney that we took last year. An incredible shot of Sean May stuffing somebody above the rim.
The ‘Helpless’ headline
Doesn’t come close to the DANG.
Better luck next year.
___________
Joe Murphy
Senior Online Content Producer
JournalNow.com
The Charlotte Observer headline is also a little witty because Seattle is known for its rain. That’s clever.
I would like to see more balanced, accurate news reported in politics. I get so sick of The Winston Salem Journal playing campaign manager to all the democrats and totally leaving out the aims of the Republican candidates or if they are even mentioned it’s only bashing as in the case of Vernon Robinson. All of my friends have stopped their subscriptions as I have. You never check out anything the mayor says, you take everything at face value and he has gotten by with many lies that you’ve printed. One being that annexation would only cost the individual several hundred dollars. He totally omitted the 41 (forty-one) dollars per foot just to run the line in front of each home, not counting cost of the line to the home. Also, he omitted the real truth, that the tax of each home being brought into the city would almost double. Many elderly people are very fearful of having to sell their homes. This story was never told by the Journal. I would like to see the Journal do much more actual investigating. There is so much to be revealed about the actions of several city council members and of the many half truths and lies the Mayor gets by with. Please start checking some facts and you’ll find some very interesting stories that have been kept hidden so well by some of those having such deep connections with the city.
Actually, we have reported all that information about annexation, from the increase in taxes to the cost of hooking up to public utilities.
This is one of the most emotional issues in a community, and there are compelling arguments on both sides. What we try to do is present those sides in a balanced way.
North Carolina has among the most aggressive annexation laws in the country. They aren’t perfect, but it’s clear to most people that the health of the state’s towns and cities is a direct result of their ability to annex adjoining areas with less restrictions than in, say, Virginia. The cost of that freedom has been people being annexed without their consent.
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