{"id":4988,"date":"2014-01-21T09:37:39","date_gmt":"2014-01-21T14:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meetcontent.com\/?p=4988"},"modified":"2017-04-20T00:26:19","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T04:26:19","slug":"blog-headlines-happens-next-will-amaze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meetcontent.com\/blog\/blog-headlines-happens-next-will-amaze\/","title":{"rendered":"We Blog About Headlines. What Comes Next Will Amaze You"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Dewey
An headline is an opportunity. Make the most of it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My first job out of college was working for the Boston Globe\u2019s website, which afforded me the opportunity to write a lot of headlines. Perhaps the best (or worst) headline I ever wrote, after a Boston Celtics victory, was \u201cPierce nets 40 as Celtics pierce Nets.\u201d Clever, eh?<\/p>\n

\u201cClever\u201d could be an apt description for many headlines you read. The goal of the headline is to tell you what a story is about, establish its tone, and entice you to read it in full. Especially in the case of softer news, headline writers often rely on puns or plays on words, linguistic tropes, or otherwise try to encapsulate the emotional thrust of the story in a few choice words. <\/p>\n

The very concept of headlines is getting a lot of attention lately thanks to viral content sharing sites like Upworthy, which have made a pageview mint<\/a> on the backs of headlines like \u201cIf This Video Makes You Uncomfortable, Then You Make Me Uncomfortable\u201d and \u201c9 Out Of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact.\u201d (This very blog post’s title is an homage to these types of headlines.)<\/p>\n

More about the Upworthy approach to headlines in a little bit, but I do believe that the debate it is prompting is valuable because it reminds us how important headlines are. We agonize over email newsletter subject lines and 140 characters of tweet text, but do we give due attention to the headlines we use in news stories, feature packages, press releases, and the like? <\/p>\n

Headlines do a lot of work for us, so are we putting in the work to ensure they are appropriate and effective?<\/p>\n

The Anatomy of a Headline<\/h2>\n
\"Oberlin<\/p>\n

On the Oberlin News Center homepage, theses headlines benefit from some descriptive text.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The job of a headline is more than an exercise in poetic license\u2014it has a lot of responsibilities. So when we dash off a cute or poignant headline for a story, are we considering all the places that headline is going to go? We are used to seeing headlines in the context of a story, with imagery, a secondary headline (subhead), and story text all there to support what the headline is saying. But that is just one possible context. For instance, it could end up:<\/p>\n