By Brice Russ
A good headline can make or break your story: it’s the first thing your readers will see and, in a news landscape increasingly driven by social media, often the last. In last weekend’s “The Art of the Headline” hands-on workshop at Professional Development Day, four experienced editors discussed the tradeoffs that must be faced when writing a headline and shared some tips and reminders to keep your headlines from going astray.
Over the course of the workshop, one issue kept coming up: how to strike the right balance between, as Jonathan Fischer of Slate put it, sensibility and “clickiness.” A successful hed, particularly in a digital or social media setting, piques the reader’s interest and compels them to click through. Yet at the same time, the headline needs to accurately and descriptively describe the actual story, especially to inform the readers who don’t click through. As moderator Rachel Gross (of Smithsonian) reminded the audience, the vast majority of the people who see your article on Facebook will only see the hed; on the web, “the headline is like 99%,” said Bryan Lufkin of BBC.
Much was made during the workshop of the “curiosity gap,” the idea that a headline should make readers curious without giving away everything. Though the panel’s editors had varying opinions on using the curiosity gap, ranging from cautious acceptance to flat-out loathing, the point was made several times that you can keep readers curious without being deceptive. “That wasn’t clickbait,” Lufkin said of one such example, “that’s just a good headline.” Nevertheless, above all else, a headline must not deceive or mislead the reader.
As writers and editors try to write headlines that are engaging, yet accurate, it’s easy to run into certain pitfalls and clichés, such as puns. The workshop’s panelists, speaking personally, were fans (often very big fans) of puns. When it came to using them in a headline, though, they cautioned against going with a joke that’s clever but doesn’t quite work or, even worse, doesn’t make sense out of context. Puns generally aren’t the way to go, Fischer said, unless they’re absolutely, positively airtight.
A good headline should be able to stand on its own in general, as Kate Travis of Science News argued. “Is this a headline, or a clever tweet?” she asked. Interesting factoids and pull quotes can make an article more shareable (and, in fact, should be kept in reserve for social copy, regardless), but if your hed is appearing on Google News, RSS readers, and other media, whatever you go with should work across all contexts. (The alternative, as Fischer does at Slate, is to write custom heds for each of these platforms.) Your hed should also match its story in tone, match its target audience in style, and work well with its accompanying image and any other metadata it appears with.
Since this was, after all, a hands-on workshop, the session wrapped up with a back-and-forth discussion of a headline for a story by Smithsonian’s Ben Panko. After taking a few minutes to review the article, panelists asked the audience to suggest what they might have done differently. Participants suggested switching words, swapping the hed or the dek, making the hed less (or more) complex; science writers, the panelists said, often have a unique responsibility to avoid exaggeration or simplification. Ultimately, though, the biggest lesson to come out of the workshop component may have been the benefits of collaboration. Many outlets have meetings or Slack channels solely to discuss headlines, a practice which was recommended unanimously.
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