Writing a good headline is a black art in any field of journalism. It has to pull the reader in, tell them enough to grab their interest but not enough to make them feel they don't need to read any of the story below it. It also has to not be shit.
It's one of those parts of a newspaper or magazine that everyone thinks is very clever when they see a good one, but believes they could've come up with something better when they read something poor. What they don't realise of course is that not only do they have to come up with the witty pun, they have to come up with a witty pun that fits exactly into space on the page. It also has to not be shit.
I bring this up because there's been some great examples floating round lately of how to, and how not to, do it. Commuter's cobbled together rag The Metro, for example, is particularly good at being exceptionally bad. I can only think that they must write the page one lead the afternoon of the previous day as nine times out of ten it usually has nothing to do with whatever the actual main story of the morning is.
This morning's main headline, for example, was the dodgy "Partying their way to mouth cancer". Which is not only confusing, misleading and uninformative, it's also broken rule number one of not remembering to not be shit. It's a story about high levels of alcohol and smoking being a major cause of the painful sounding mouth cancer, the trouble is though that this headline makes it sounds really, really fun. Yesterday's was the even worse "Teachers target pencil sharpeners". With what? Guns? Bow and arrow? Elastic band on the end of the thumb?* They also tortured the entire population of London's train system with the excrutiating "Owls it feel to be my best friend?". A dog has befriended a baby owl you see. Jesus.
The Harrow Observer is a classic local paper, on the other hand, and passing its offices on the way to work means I always see the hand written** posters that the street vendors use. This week it's the fantastic "Latest on stabbed vicar". Now that's a local paper headline. Firstly, it's the 'latest' on the unfortunate clergyman, which makes you want to know what the previous story was, then we know someone's been stabbed, always gruesome and therefore brilliant stuff, and finally, who's been stabbed? A man? A woman? No, a vicar. Perfect.
Headline of the week though? In The Sun following the England victory over Argentina the sublime "Senor not singing any more". They thought of that and then came up with the story didn't they?
The worst crime a sub can commit though is to refuse to let an idea go and try and crowbar and squeeze it into the space they've got by tweaking it. Trouble is, tweaking tends to cause trouble. This is what leads to the classic headlines "Man found dead in graveyard", "Police comb Shepherd's Bush" and "Stadium fire: Manager grilled". My favourite though is the local paper story of a business man stranded overseas during the Xmas holidays thanks to a baggage handlers' strike, therefore missing his child's first festive season. The headline? "Man stuck in Turkey for Christmas".
*Or 'lazzie band', see previous entry
**Actually printed using a font that looks like handwriting, therefore making the art of printing come a rather pointless full circle
