What comes to mind when you read the following headlines?
- Crime spree under investigation
- Access debate may not be over
- Snow plays havoc
- Area News Briefs
- BLM removes 3 miles of fence
- Laughter as medicine, again
I’m thinking that they leave you with more questions than answers. Right?
These are six of the headlines that appeared on the Chronicle’s Web page in the past few days. They are identical to the headlines on the corresponding articles that appeared in the printed version of the paper, and I’m willing to bet there wasn’t any confusion with those articles.
Why is that? Context. Headlines in the printed paper sit right above the photos, text and other information that make up the story. After spying a short, non-descriptive headline like these, your eye drifts down to the rest of the story and makes sense of it.
Readers on the Web, though, don’t have that luxury, for the most part. All the nicely laid out pages, photos and text may be divorced from that headline, a click away from the readers’ eyes. And unless those readers have a reason to click — or at least a headline that tells them what to expect from the story — they won’t.
Take for example the infamous cover of the San Francisco Examiner from Sept. 12, 2001, right after the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In context, with that tremendous photo of the towers burning, the headline makes sense. It’s evocative. It’s a beautiful headline — for a newspaper front page.
For the Web, though, it stinks. It’s just one word that has little to do with actually happened in New York City. When Google or any other search engine indexes that page, the machine doing the work isn’t going to know to connect that headline with others describing the attacks.
Elinor Mills at CNET wrote about this subject in 2007 and had this to say:
Pithy, witty and provocative headlines — the pride of many an editor — are often useless and even counterproductive in getting the Web page ranked high in search engines. A low ranking means limited exposure and fewer readers.
Search engines drive people’s behavior online, and the part of a story they most often see first is the headline. That headline is a promise, writes Brian Clark. “It’s job is to clearly communicate the benefit that you will deliver to the reader in exchange for their valuable time.”
So how could we apply some of these ideas to the six headlines I listed above? Consider the following suggestions.
- Bozeman police investigating a string of local thefts and criminal mischief complaints
- Gallatin County abandons three county roads, but debate over access rights may not be over
- Large snow storm downs trees, causes wrecks and plays general havoc on Bozeman area
- Bozeman area news in brief
- Bureau of Land Management removes three miles of fence near Ennis
- Bozeman group gets together for laughter therapy
None of these headlines are particularly witty, but they are descriptive. In all of them, I added some indication of the place the story deals with. You can see how I’ve expanded the detail level on all the others.
The important thing to remember about writing headlines for the Web is that there are no space restrictions. Do not abbreviate or use punctuation tricks to shorten the content. Write it out so the machines indexing our sites (and our readers) can make sense of them.
This entry is also posted on my other blog, Web Works.
Related posts:
- Ethical issue: Local paper edits online-published story with no notice of the edit UPDATED
- Online authority debate centering on Twitter
- UPDATED City of Bozeman asks for online passwords for job applicant background checks
- Maybe paying for news online is a good thing
- Christian Science Monitor quitting print
Michael Becker has been blogging about academia, digital culture and journalism since 2005. He is the Web editor of the
3 Comments
Ya know, your six suggestions for rewritten headlines can’t be viewed at the same time as the six original headlines — I had to scroll up to look at one, then back down to compare, and on and on — they were too divorced!
Buy a bigger monitor.
Buy a bigger monitor.