From the Rose Law Group Growlery/By Phil Riske, managing editor
Within ethical limits, we compose headlines with intent to create enough interest that the story will at least clicked on.
A headline should be honest enough to represent an element of the story.
And there are degrees of directness or remoteness (the “stretch”) of a headline’s actual relationship to the story.
We often fall into the pun trap. Stories about marijuana often have “high” in the headline, and football coaches “tackle” problems with their teams.
Although a satirical publication, The Onion brings home the real possibility of the flat-out lying headline. Here are some excerpts:
“Seeking to maximize the potential reach of their latest post, sources confirmed Thursday that the editors of news website The Daily Blotter managed to force the word “millennials” into the article’s headline in order to boost pageviews.
“This post was about to go live when I realized that shoehorning the word ‘millennials’ into both the header and the lede somewhere would probably double the number of eyeballs we get on it, so I sent it back to the section editor for another pass,” senior editor Jeffrey Gein told reporters, noting” the 400-word article concerning new workplace regulations has no connection whatsoever to the millennial demographic.”
By the way, most writing stylebooks are in agreement millennial should not be capitalized.
With all the knowledge we’ve provided in this column, you are now well “ahead” of the game.
If you read it, that is.
