TEACH SEX TO
NORTH-EAST
BOYS’ BRIGADES
Headlines which seem to put the newspaper solidly behind some outsider’s expressed opinion, however enticing, have no place in the news columns. The worst tendentious headlines seem to commit the newspaper to a particular political policy when in fact it may be merely reporting someone else’s views:
STEEL BILL
ELECTIONS NOW
APPALS WORLD
A CLEAR DUTY
This kind of editorialising must be avoided by using quotes or naming an authority in the main deck of the headline. It is a simple mistake. More reprehensible still are the headlines where the writer lets either cleverness or prejudice prevail:
‘I’M NOT THREATENING’,
BROWN THREATENS
It is a step from this twisted headline writing to the odious practice of using loaded words in heads:
SMITH GLOATS
STRIKERS WHINE
OVER RACIAL
FOR MORE TIME
POLICY
Headline writers must put their personal opinions aside. They are there to reflect as accurately as possible the content of the story. Headline writers are neither for nor against. They are neutral –and when they are headlining a controversial debate in Parliament or Senate in a dispute of any kind, they should be balanced in their choice of points for the headlines. Some of the trouble arises because headline writers are hypnotised by a good headline phrase. The Conservatives at one local council attacked a Labour airfield project as a ‘white elephant’ so when the decision was reached the sub-editor wrote:
THORNABY LABOUR MEN
BACK WHITE ELEPHANT
This headline seemed to accept the ‘white elephant’ tag without question. Even with quotes around ‘white elephant’ it would hardly have been a fair headline because the words are so strongly biased (despite their merit of suggesting controversy).
Accuracy
The headline must be accurate in its detail and true to the meaning of the whole report. It is easy to escalate the meaning of the story by choosing the wrong heading: ‘Worst unemployment rate in country’, said the headline. The story said: ‘One of the highest unemployment rates …’ which is not the same thing. ‘Boots take over Timothy Whites’ said the headline when the bid had been made, but before the deal had gone through. On a story about a court delaying a pay rise by three months it was inaccurate to write ‘Court cancels pay rise’.
How the News Headline Says It
The legendary Daily Express editor Arthur Christiansen defined effective headlines thus: ‘Good headlines are written in vigorous, conversational, idiomatic language. Good headlines should be capable of being read aloud – which the mind does subconsciously.’
Having discussed the general principles of news and accuracy which are the foundations of the headline, we now examine some of the detailed techniques for making the headline effective. Let us first, however, dispense with Helen of Troy, whom we left at the beginning of the chapter. ‘How Helen did the Housekeeping’ is an acceptable headline on the feature text in mind there, but it is not the kind of headline we shall spend most of the time discussing. It does not tell us how Helen did the housekeeping. It only holds out the promise that the text will. It does not inform. It tempts. The distinction of the hard news headline is that it always gives information. How to give the crucial information quickly and intelligibly within the confines of a column is the major skill of news-headline writing.
The Helen type of headline is more appropriate for the longer feature or news-in-depth piece, where the aim is not to give immediate information but to explore, discuss or relate a rich narrative whose ideas are too complex and diffuse to be done justice by a hard news headline focused on a single key point. There are a few other occasions when you will want to write a Helen-type headline in the news columns, to use temptation rather than information. It will never happen with a real news story where the emphasis is on quick communication of information – where information is a real attraction to readers.
But on lighter stories in the news columns it may be better for a change of pace to write ‘Why the General saw red’ rather than ‘Painted flagpole angers General’. That might be enough for many readers without their reading further; and the hard news heading might also seem to give such newspaper trivia an undue sense of importance.
A better guide for news headlines than Helen of Troy is the newspaper adage ‘Man bites dog’. It is not merely a good story. It is also a good headline, in its own right, for reasons I will adduce. It may seem odd to be writing about ‘the headline’ when you consider the rich and often comic differences in the headlines of different papers. The headline writer stands in the middle between the newspaper’s sense of its identity with its attitudes to life and news, and the newspaper’s audience with its levels of education and knowledge.
It is not surprising that newspapers sometimes disagree about what is the most important feature of a news report, still less that they find themselves expressing this in different tones. ‘Mr Charles Chaplin returns’, says one in the manner of a butler at a banquet. Another shouts ‘Charlie’s back!’ But the differences in news selection and even in tone do not mean there are two sets of opposing principles for headline writing. All good news headlines follow certain rules, in what they say and how they say it. What they say is the single most urgent news point (as the newspaper sees it), accurately, intelligibly and impartially. How they say it varies much less than appears.
Verbs
Here are some headlines which say the same news point in different ways – but there is something common in the construction of all these headlines and you should see if you can spot what it is. There are three pairs of headlines for three separate stories, and in each case the ‘serious’ headline is on the left and the ‘popular’ headline on the right.
RADIO RELAY
UP GOES ‘FLYING POST OFFICE’
SATELLITE PUT IN ORBIT BY US
STUDENTS CHALLENGE DE GAULLE’S RULE
DANNY THE RED HUMBLES DE GAULLE
BENN ACCUSES US FIRM
US ATOM BRAIN POACHERS WARNED
The popular papers were trying to emphasise the personal, dramatic or romantic elements. But every headline had a single common characteristic – a verb. News is activity and a verb represents action. It could be an excellent rule always to have a verb in the headline: but there are occasions when it is better to include the verb by implication, rather than by statement, and others when a rich phrase without a verb may be preferred. But these are the exceptions. Headlines must live. Most headlines without a verb are only half alive. They tell readers nothing and produce an effect of dullness and monotony: no news today. The deadest kind of news headline is the simple generalised label:
FRANCE AND
AMERICAN VIEWS
THE CONCORDE
ON CHINA
Well, thinks the reader, get on with it. What about France and the Concorde? What are America’s views on China? There always have been American views on China; what the headline should be telling is what is new or significant about them.
It is odd the way the label has persisted. It does not follow naturally from regarding a headline as a truncated sentence. It is an artificial form, a legacy from a more pompous age. Who would ever dream of transmitting news verbally in the way these headlines do in print:
CLIMBER’S
GREEK PURGE
400 ft
OF CIVIL
DEATH FALL
SERVICE
It is much more natural and fresh to write as you would say:
CLIMBER
GREEKS PURGE
DIES IN
CIVIL
400 ft FALL
SERVICE
Active verbs
It follows that if the verb is the secret of the active headline, it should be the most active verb which fits the facts. If the verb is weak, the headline is weak. The normal headline ha
s no room for adjectives. Its colour and spice must come from a rich verb. If a wife goes to court to make an emotional appeal for her husband, who has not stopped after a road crash, it is too pallid when you say in the headline ‘Wife asks judge for leniency’. A livelier and more informative headline might be: ‘Wife pleads for hit-and-run driver’. The verb ‘pleads’ gives an immediate and arresting impression of what happened; and the construction of the headline then allows room for the added information that he is a hit-and-run driver.
A verb is better than no verb, but vague portmanteau verbs will not do. Avoid, for instance, saying: ‘Archbishop gives views on racial policy’ when what the Archbishop has done is condemn the policy in vigorous terms. Do not say ‘Lorry damages shop’ when in fact the lorry has wrecked the shop completely (and vice versa). Avoid, when you can, using parts of the weak verb ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ as the main verbs in headlines. A headline gains in strength when a stronger verb is used:
ISTANBUL HAS
EARTHQUAKE ROCKS
EARTHQUAKE
ISTANBUL
TORY IS OUT
TORY BEATEN
Nor are parts of the verb ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ needed as auxiliaries. An intelligible headline is often much more emphatic without them. For instance, ‘Jones arrested’ is more urgent than ‘Jones is arrested’, and ‘Miners told to quit’ is better than ‘Miners are told to quit’. There will be occasions, too, when the verb ‘to be’ should be omitted even though this seems to leave the headline without a verb. In headlines like this the verb ‘to be’ is clearly implied:
TOWN HALL (IS) IN DANGER
POLICE (ARE) IN GUN DRAMA
(THERE ARE) SHADOWS OVER
PEACE TALKS
Present and future tense
A further point about the verb in the headline may already be apparent. The headlines have used the present tense to describe events that have already happened. There are good reasons for this. First, the present tense is active. It puts readers into the middle of the action. It gives them a feeling of participation. Secondly, the event may be past, but it is recent past, and readers are learning of it for the first time. They perfectly well understand the convention and will infer from a present-tense headline that the event occurred within the publishing time of the newspaper: that a headline in the present tense in the morning newspaper is presenting the news of yesterday. Similarly, a weekly newspaper is understood to be presenting the news of the week and may use present tense for the events of the week. There is a point at which it will no longer do. It cannot be used in a report of a court case based on earlier events where it would suggest that the offence was being committed again: ‘Baker sold loaves underweight’, not ‘Baker sells loaves underweight’. And any heading with a past time element built into it must carry past tense in agreement: ‘Attlee backed Truman in 1946 dispute’. (Further, there is one headline construction, of which more later, which reports even contemporaneous events in the past tense: ‘The girl who hid under the bed’.)
The way the tenses are used may be illustrated by an imaginary example. A speaker who on Thursday denounces a current dock dispute may properly on Friday be headlined: ‘Dockers strike for selfish reasons, says union leader’. The remarks were made the day before, but they earn the present tense.
Imagine now that the dockers’ dispute had ended a few days before. The union leader’s remarks would then be headlined: ‘Dockers struck for selfish reasons, says union leader’. To have retained the form ‘dockers strike’ would have suggested the strike was continuing, or that the union leader was referring to a more general attitude of dockers. Past time is rarely specified. ‘Yesterday’, for instance, is a word almost never justified in a morning paper headline because almost every item could be headed ‘yesterday’ and readers, anyway, take it for granted it was yesterday. But since a newspaper’s future is infinite, it is generally best to specify future time: ‘Dockers will strike tomorrow/next week/next month’. Note here how the omission of ‘will’ could still imply future tense, thanks to the specific future date.
Most headlines are in the present or future tense. Deaths happen in the present: ‘Mayor dies’ is better than ‘Mayor has died’, or, of course, ‘Death of Mayor’. But there is one caution: it would be macabre to add a time reference to such a headline: ‘Mayor dies today’. After a death, headline references to the person naturally carry past tense – except that a headline on a will may be present tense, since the legacy when declared is a contemporary act: ‘Johnson bequeaths park to town’.
The active voice
Above all, prefer the active voice to the passive. In other words, write headlines with somebody saying something or doing something, rather than having it told to them or done to them. ‘Boy falls into well’ is what people say and what text editors should write as a headline, rather than this published but unnatural back-to-front headline:
FALL INTO WELL
INJURES BOY
Compare the active voice of the first version with the wordier passive of the second:
US DEMANDS RELEASE OF SEIZED SHIP
RELEASE OF SEIZED SHIP DEMANDED BY US
Notice how the passive voice breeds extra words, excess weight which exhausts the headline. Given the same headline constituents, the active voice can say more. Rejecting a passive construction can lead to a more vivid construction altogether, because it may offer a chance to exploit better the amount of headline space available. For instance:
WOMAN FOUND DEAD BY HUSBAND
‘Husband finds woman dead’ is the active voice. This more direct approach immediately opens up other possibilities. ‘Wife’ is a shorter word than ‘woman’ and also shows that she is married. There may be room for a better headline altogether:
CITY BANKER FINDS WIFE DEAD
or
MAN FINDS WIFE DEAD IN CAR
Subject Omitted
So far I have argued that we want a verb; a verb in the present tense; and, as a rule, a verb in the active voice. Considering the headline as an edited sentence leads us now to another important element: the subject of the sentence, the ‘who’ of the headline. Failure to appreciate that the headline is really a truncated, but still meaningful, sentence, and that the reader understands it as such, is the reason for the appalling habit, spread from North America, of writing headlines where the subject is casually omitted and the headline begins on a verb. This has grown not from any urgent theory about bringing in the verb first, but because it is easier to make a heading fit if you can drop the subject. It is indeed easier – easier on the text editor but harder on the reader. A headline is not a choice number of words arbitrarily bolted together. It has its own integrity. It is a crisper version of the way we communicate by speech and prose. In prose we omit the subject (though it is understood) only for injunctions or commands. To do the same thing for a narrative headline in the present tense is to do violence to the language:
HUNT BOMBS IN GREENLAND
What does that convey? The reader is to go off and hunt bombs in Greenland. But what the headline was trying to say was that American air force search parties were already looking for bombs in Greenland. ‘Airmen seek lost bombs’ would have made sense and it would have fitted. Headlines exist to serve the news and not the other way round. If a story is so difficult with a word like ‘radiographer’, say – then a good layout editor will change the page so that a meaningful headline can be written. If one is going to write a headline without a subject it should not be done merely by writing the full headline (‘Radiographer steals pistol to end life’ and then deleting the excess word ‘Radiographer’ – ‘Steals pistol to end life’). Indeed, ‘end life’ in the subjectless headline does not make it clear whose life it is. It is possible in this instance to write an acceptable headline, admittedly with a compound noun, but none the less a headline which is intelligible and tells more of the story than the subjectless heading:
WOMAN STOLE GUN FOR SUICIDE
Who�
�s Who
The subject should be there. How you describe the ‘who’ of the story is a matter for further discussion. There are all sorts of ways. John Jones, say, is at once a Welshman, a baker, a Unitarian, a driver, a father, a golfer, a man, an objector to a road proposal, a rescuer in a river accident, or simply ‘he’. Which of the words you use to describe him in the headline must in part depend on the nature of the news. A name will rarely be used in a headline: it has to mean something to readers. Thus ‘Mr Jones protests at shop closing-hours’ says less than ‘Baker protests at shop closing-hours’. If Mr Jones the baker is chased by a bull while playing golf he would become ‘Golfer chased’, rather than ‘Baker chased’ since the latter headline would give the impression the bull was in his bakery. A name should, of course, be used in a headline when it gives authority to the news. If the name is known, use the name and not other titles. If there is doubt about whether somebody is well enough known the good text editor will use a title, since this doubt will become a certainty for the average reader. But there is one exception to this: to err generously on the side of headlining the name in an obituary. The most important piece of information is who has died, and it is a contortion that produces a headline such as:
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