Headline

The headline is the text indicating the content or nature of the article below it, typically by providing a form of brief summary of its contents.

This article is about newspaper headlines. For other uses, see Headlines (disambiguation).

The large type front page headline did not come into use until the late 19th century when increased competition between newspapers led to the use of attention-getting headlines.

It is sometimes termed a news hed, a deliberate misspelling that dates from production flow during hot type days, to notify the composing room that a written note from an editor concerned a headline and should not be set in type.^[1]

Headlines in English often use a set of grammatical rules known as headlinese, designed to meet stringent space requirements by, for example, leaving out forms of the verb "to be" and choosing short verbs like "eye" over longer synonyms like "consider".

Typology[edit]

Research in 1980 classified newspaper headlines into four broad categories: questions, commands, statements, and explanations.^[5] Advertisers and marketers classify advertising headlines slightly differently into questions, commands, benefits, news/information, and provocation.^[6]

and articles (a, an, the) are usually omitted.

Forms of the verb "to be"

Most are in the simple present tense, e.g. "Governor signs bill", while the future is expressed by an infinitive, with to followed by a verb, as in "Governor to sign bill"

verbs

The "and" is often replaced by a comma, as in "Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap".^[22]

conjunction

Individuals are usually specified by surname only, with no .

honorifics

Organizations and institutions are often indicated by : "Wall Street" for the US financial sector, "Whitehall" for the UK government administration, "Madrid" for the government of Spain, "Davos" for World Economic Forum, and so on.

metonymy

Many , including contractions and acronyms, are used: in the UK, some examples are Lib Dems (for the Liberal Democrats), Tories (for the Conservative Party); in the US, Dems (for "Democrats") and GOP (for the Republican Party, from the nickname "Grand Old Party"). The period (full point) is usually omitted from these abbreviations, though U.S. may retain them, especially in all-caps headlines to avoid confusion with the word us.

abbreviations

Lack of a terminating (period) even if the headline forms a complete sentence.

full stop

Use of to indicate a claim or allegation that cannot be presented as a fact. For example, an article titled "Ultra-processed foods 'linked to cancer'" covered a study which suggested a link but acknowledged that its findings were not definitive.^[23]^[24] Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum characterizes this practice as deceptive, noting that the single-quoted expressions in newspaper headlines are often not actual quotations, and sometimes convey a claim that is not supported by the text of the article.^[25] Another technique is to present the claim as a question, hence Betteridge's law of headlines.^[23]^[26]

single quotation marks

– Variety on Black Monday (1929)

WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG

– Variety writing that rural moviegoers preferred urban films (1935)

STICKS NIX HICK PIX

– Chicago Tribune reporting the wrong election winner (1948)

DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN

– New York Daily News reporting the denial of a federal bailout for bankrupt New York City (1975)

FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD

– The Boston Globe in-house joke headline for an editorial, which was not changed before 161,000 copies had been printed. Theo Lippman Jr. of the Baltimore Sun declared "Mush from the Wimp" the second most famous newspaper headline of the 20th century, behind "Wall St. Lays an Egg" and ahead of "Ford to City: Drop Dead".^[32]

MUSH FROM THE WIMP

– New York Post on a local murder (1983)^[33]

HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR

– New York Daily News front-page caption on a photo (1979) reporting an agreement to avoid fare increases on city transit services, making a multi-word pun on the Latin phrase Sic transit gloria mundi^[34]

SICK TRANSIT'S GLORIOUS MONDAY

– The UK Sun on the torpedoing of the Argentine ship Belgrano and sinking of a gunboat during the Falklands War (1982)

GOTCHA

– The UK Sun (1986), claiming that the comedian had eaten a fan's pet hamster in a sandwich. The story was later proven false, but is seen as one of the classic tabloid newspaper headlines.^[35]

FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER

GREAT SATAN SITS DOWN WITH THE AXIS OF EVIL – (UK) on US-Iran talks (2007)^[36]

The Times

SUPER CALEY GO BALLISTIC CELTIC ARE ATROCIOUS – Sun on beating Celtic F.C. in the Scottish Cup;^[37] a pun on "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"

Inverness Caledonian Thistle

WE ARE POPE (in German: ); Bild after a German was voted to become Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.

Wir sind Papst

Some famous headlines in periodicals include:

The New Republic editor Michael Kinsley began a contest to find the most boring newspaper headline.^[38] According to him, no entry surpassed the one that had inspired him to create the contest: "WORTHWHILE CANADIAN INITIATIVE",^[39] over a column by The New York Times' Flora Lewis.^[40] In 2003, New York Magazine published a list of eleven "greatest tabloid headlines".^[41]

, a 2004 Hong Kong film

A-1 Headline

– Journalistic adage on questions in headlines

Betteridge's law of headlines

a type of news story, and accompanying headline

Bus plunge

Copy editing

Corporate jargon

words common in crosswords that are otherwise rarely used

Crosswordese

– Piece of news text

Dateline

omission of words

Ellipsis (linguistics)

(from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno)

Headlines

Lead paragraph

– In journalism, a paragraph that provides context for the story

Nut paragraph

leads to multiple humorous possible alternative interpretations of written headline

Syntactic ambiguity

– Name of a published text or work of art

Title (publishing)

Arens, William F. (1996). . Irwin. ISBN 978-0-256-18257-6.

Contemporary Advertising

Davis, Boyd H.; Brewer, Jeutonne (1 January 1997). . SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-3475-8.

Electronic Discourse: Linguistic Individuals in Virtual Space

(1974). News Headlines (Editing and Design : Book Three) Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd. ISBN 978-0-434-90552-2

Harold Evans

(1966). What The Papers Didn't Mean to Say. Scouse Press, Liverpool ISBN 0901367028

Fritz Spiegl

Mårdh, Ingrid (1980); Headlinese: On the Grammar of English Front Page headlines; "Lund studies in English" series; Lund, Sweden: Liberläromedel/Gleerup; 91-40-04753-9

ISBN

Biber, D. (2007); "Compressed noun phrase structures in newspaper discourse: The competing demands of popularization vs. economy"; in W. Teubert and R. Krishnamurthy (eds.); Corpus linguistics: Critical concepts in linguistics; vol. V, pp. 130–141; London: Routledge

Exhibition of famous newspaper headlines