I have taken to reading the newspaper on my phone, which I guess makes it not a paper at all - but I don't want to get into that right now. I've taken to reading the USA Today, not because it is a superior publication, but rather I can get it for free on my phone and I think it is important to be up to date on current events (not the reading a single news publication does that, but it is a start). My biggest beef with newspapers (besides them being wrapped around it - they don't do that anymore do they?) is the way headlines are formed. I've never understood why the headline can't be a clear and complete phrase. Instead the headlines are often written as if a drunk Yoda was the writer, with the subject being the very last word and the rest of the line make little to no sense. Now not all headlines are like this, but I've found that quite a few are and I am curious how the editors allow this to happen. I mean certainly as an editor you'd read the headline and then decide you need to fire your writers because they've been drinking and writing and that certainly is dangerous. I doubt that I'll ever hear of a reason that I find acceptable for why the headlines are written the way they are - for I don't think there is an acceptable reason (and by acceptable I mean it makes complete logical sense that they write a bumbled sentence rather then trying something different that is more succinct).
I'd also like to point out that this is marked as my 100th post. I'd say that is a momentous occasion, however, having been working on this blog going on somewhere between one and two years, that isn't a terribly good track record. None the less, Yay me!
(and now a completely improv'ed poem - it is the 100th post after all)
Newspaper Poem
Going under
is what they say
newspapers are doing.
It is the internet
they blame.
Not billions of TV's
and their talking heads
who spew
"the news"
24/7
Copyright 2009
Edit: So I just looked at my numbers, and it says I have a hundred posts, yet when I count I don't see that many. I got 43 (for 07) 40 (for 08) and 2 (for 09)... perhaps I'm adding wrong, but that just doesn't seem right. I think I'll just say I'm at 100 when I get 15 more posts in.
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2 comments:
The Arizona Daily Star posted an article last week with the headline "Weather Warms, Scorpion Bites Rise." There were a lot of comments online about scorpions stinging, not biting. One former editor posted this response: "Writing headlines for a paper really is pretty tough. I know, because I have done it. What a headline writer gets out of the composing room is a page which has some stories on it, and those stories are in columns which have a predetermined width to them. That allows only so many characters for the headline. The goal of the headline writer is to fill every one of those characters, but he can't have any extras. 'Stings' has one too many characters in it, and it won't fit. So the headline writer fell back to “bites” which will fit and means the same thing to most people." Sounds like an excuse for lack of creativity to me, but when you are under a deadline, maybe it is true.
Amazingly, I just got an email advertising journalism courses, one of which is "Writing Better Print Headlines" See it here: http://www.journalismtraining.org/action/advanced_search?detail=1&id=5852
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