Headline

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

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 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]

Criticism

Sensationalism, inaccuracy and misleading headlines

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (December 2022)

"Slam"

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

"Crash blossoms" is a term used to describe headlines that have unintended ambiguous meanings, such as

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:

• Forms of the verb "to be" and articles (a, an, the) are usually omitted.
• Most
  simple present tense, e.g. "Governor signs bill", while the future is expressed by an infinitive
  , with to followed by a verb, as in "Governor to sign bill"
• The
  conjunction "and" is often replaced by a comma, as in "Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap".^[22]
• Individuals are usually specified by surname only, with no honorifics.
• Organizations and institutions are often indicated by metonymy: "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.
• Many
  acronyms, are used: in the UK, some examples are Lib Dems (for the Liberal Democrats), Tories (for the Conservative Party); in the US, Dems (for "Democrats") and GOP (for the Republican Party
  , from the nickname "Grand Old Party"). The period (full point) is usually omitted from these abbreviations, though U.S. may retain them, especially in all-caps headlines to avoid confusion with the word us.
• Lack of a terminating full stop (period) even if the headline forms a complete sentence.
• Use of single 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] Linguist Geoffrey 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, hence Betteridge's law of headlines.^[23][26]

Some periodicals have their own distinctive headline styles, such as Variety and its entertainment-jargon headlines, most famously "Sticks Nix Hick Pix".

Commonly used short words

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]}

Famous examples

Some famous headlines in periodicals include:

• Black Monday
  (1929)
• STICKS NIX HICK PIX – Variety writing that rural moviegoers preferred urban films (1935)
• DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN – Chicago Tribune reporting the wrong election winner (1948)
• FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD – New York Daily News reporting the denial of a federal bailout for bankrupt New York City
  (1975)
• Baltimore 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".^[32]
• HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR – New York Post on a local murder (1983)^[33]
• 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 phrase Sic transit gloria mundi^[34]
• GOTCHA – The UK Sun on the torpedoing of the Argentine ship Belgrano and sinking of a gunboat during the Falklands War (1982)
• tabloid newspaper headlines.^[35]
• GREAT SATAN SITS DOWN WITH THE AXIS OF EVIL – The Times (UK) on US-Iran talks (2007)^[36]
• SUPER CALEY GO BALLISTIC CELTIC ARE ATROCIOUS – Sun on
  Inverness Caledonian Thistle beating Celtic F.C. in the Scottish Cup;^[37] a pun on "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
  "
• WE ARE POPE (in German: Wir sind Papst); Bild after a German was voted to become Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.

• A-1 Headline, a 2004 Hong Kong film
• Betteridge's law of headlines – Journalistic adage on questions in headlines
• Bus plunge
  , a type of news story, and accompanying headline
• Copy editing
• Corporate jargon
• Crosswordese, words common in crosswords that are otherwise rarely used
• Dateline – Piece of news text
• Ellipsis (linguistics), omission of words
• Headlines (from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
  )
• Lead paragraph
• Nut paragraph
   – In journalism, a paragraph that provides context for the storyPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Syntactic ambiguity, leads to multiple humorous possible alternative interpretations of written headline
• Title (publishing) – Name of a published text or work of art

References

Works cited

• Arens, William F. (1996). Contemporary Advertising. Irwin.
  ISBN 978-0-256-18257-6
  .
• Davis, Boyd H.; Brewer, Jeutonne (1 January 1997). Electronic Discourse: Linguistic Individuals in Virtual Space. SUNY Press.
  ISBN 978-0-7914-3475-8
  .

Further reading

• ISBN 978-0-434-90552-2
• ISBN 0901367028
• Mårdh, Ingrid (1980); Headlinese: On the Grammar of English Front Page headlines; "Lund studies in English" series; Lund, Sweden: Liberläromedel/Gleerup;
  ISBN 91-40-04753-9
• 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

External links

Look up headline in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Front Page – The British Library Exhibition of famous newspaper headlines