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Those of us who write headlines for a living share a special reverence for one that topped the New York Post of April 15, 1983:

“HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR”

A headline so good you don’t need to read the story, but will because you can’t help yourself. Among the coolest five words ever to appear in large black type on cheap newsprint.

A little-known runner-up for coolest-words-in-black honors appeared in the Peoria Journal Star when I worked there in the late 1990s. It was written in small type atop a crime brief tucked somewhere deep in the local news section on a Sunday morning following a slow Saturday. One of the young wags on the Saturday night crew successfully sneaked this treasure into the paper:

Police find crack
in man’s underpants

I almost coughed up a lung laughing when I saw it in the paper that morning.

The Columbia Journalism Review has a back-page feature called The Lower Case, samplings of heads gone wrong that were best summarized in a small paperback book called “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge” (another shining example: “Here’s how to lick your doberman’s leg sores!”). News of this feature’s humor potential apparently made its way to the writing staff of Jay Leno, whose headline hightlights became a comic staple.

One of our goals in life as Serious Purveyors of Important News is to keep our headlines out of The Lower Case and off the Leno highlights reel. But I remember the guy who wrote the “crack” headline: couple years out of college, known to read his poetry in public, given to dark thoughts and evil impulses. In retrospect it occurs to me he probably wrote it deliberately to see if he could get it on the Leno show. I seem to recall that he succeeded. An irony pioneer if there ever was one. Back then I thought he was foolish, reckless and devoid of standards of propriety. Today I wish I could say I’d written that headline.

I had one that came close, again at the Journal Star, where pretty much everything had a fighting chance of showing up in print if it didn’t have the F-word in it. I was doing Page One for Sunday’s paper, and my story for the top of the page was a lamentation on the seedy, lurid scandal that got Bill Clinton impeached. My headline:

“Impeachment left fabric of Washington indelibly stained”

I just thought it sounded good and nothing more, till a colleague reminded me about Monica’s dress and its famous DNA evidence of presidential shenanigans. My first instinct was to rewrite it — it’s bad form to make cute, clever allusions on Serious Page One News (particularly when alluding to the messy consequences of oral sex) — but everybody else liked the head and talked me into going with it. My Mercury News colleagues were appalled to learn I’d gotten away with such a transgression, but I assured them I had learned the error of my ways and vowed to never sin again. (Today I’m kind of proud of that headline).

Lately I’ve been thinking that if I ever wanted to write a memoir about my life in the news biz, “Police Find Crack in Man’s Underpants” would be the title. Whether I get around to the memoir is anybody’s guess. But the memory of that headline always makes me smile, so that’s reason enough to memorialize it here.

Super Bowl boob reference of the day:

Janet Jackson as another, um, single out

Hats off to the smart-alecks on the Arizona Star copy desk.

Nicole muses on the right and wrong reasons to put commas in headlines.

For those of you who don’t write heads for a living: a comma implies “and”:

Scores of angry ducks, geese infest City Hall

Nicole’s point is that it’s bad enough we’ve turned “and” into a comma … we shouldn’t make headlinese even more insufferable by using commas to mean “but” or “or.” (Fine, now that “Conjunction Junction” song by those Grammar Rocks people is stuck in my head) .

Long as we’re on the subject of punctuating headlines: not everybody is clear on what to do with a semicolon in a headline. My rule is that it substitutes for a period and cuts the headline into two sentences. If the second half of the head is a complete thought, it should be capitalized.
Example:

City Hall coated in fowl feces;
Mayor seeks disaster relief

I guess it’s one of the odd conventions that because we don’t put periods in headlines, we have to use semicolons.

Speaking of bad habits, one of the worst is taking “to be” verbs out of headlines. On the features desk we try to put ‘em back in, if at all possible.

My goal is to make headlines sound like actual sentences that were written by an actual writer rather than something cobbled together by a technician hired to make X number of words/letters fit into a tight space.

I am speaking of yet another example of Poynter Institute silliness, this time praising so-called prize-winning headlines. I could link to the list but I prefer the outpouring of invective over at Testy Copy Editors.

Did you know the Poynter site has been taking these submissions since September 2002? Neither did I.

Blanp rails yet again on people’s lopsided notions of “good” headlines.

My favorite riposte:

Nearly all winners in headline contests are puns. Usually, they aren

Testy Copy Editors mull the headlinage on Saddam’s capture. Consensus is that “Ace in the Hole” was a bad idea.

The post below reminded me of a story Brian Throckmorton used to tell. He was our features desk copy chief at the Mercury News until he got a better gig back in Lexington, Ky., running the copy desks at the Herald leader.

Brian wasn’t given to Universal Pronouncements in regards to headline writing, but he had one hard-and-fast rule: Headlines with the word “still” in them were banned. Because, if the head says “still” it means “what was true yesterday is true today; there’s no news here.” His favorite saying was passed down to him by another editor, presumably also from the Blue Ridge region:

“The only time I want to see ’still’ in a headline is if one blows up.”

… and how we do ourselves few compliments by trying to walk in his shoes.

Nicole and Clay agree we’re not exactly clever when we get all Seussian in regards to the “Cat in the Hat” movie. In deference to Mr. Blanchard, I made a weak attempt to discourage similar hilarity on our desk, to no avail. I originally posted our results here but realized I was violating my “don’t blog about my actual job” dictum, so I took ‘em back out.

I can see the “why can’t you guys ever lighten up” viewpoint … where’s the harm in letting the desk have a little fun for once? But I can also see the Blanchard viewpoint, which is: we’re professionals and our need for amusement is secondary to our readers’ need to be be told what the story’s about. It doesn’t need to be cute or clever, it just needs to tell ‘em what they don’t know.

If you’re writing a headline and some bright idea pops into you head, you should be asking, “will every other rimrat on earth have the same idea?” If the answer is remotely close to yes, do something else.

Array of them revealed at Testy Copy Editors. Even the mighty Blanp has some doozies. I also liked this comment.

I find that it’s usually the most productive, strap-the-newspaper-on-their-back copy editors who make these shockingly embarrassing mistakes. That’s because they’re accepting the most opportunities to make mistakes day after day. It’s the same way in baseball: the guy who makes the most errors isn’t the worst fielder; he’s the guy who gets to the most batted balls. The worst fielder is the guy who doesn’t make a lot of errors but stands in the same place all the time and doesn’t go after the hard hits. We’ve all worked with copy editors like that. The only way to avoid making mistakes is to do absolutely nothing.

I don’t really have any bad headline stories to report — must be I’m not productive enough — but this thread did remind me of something that happened when I worked at the Tampa Trib: I was in the backshop checking pages and noticed a hilarious faux pax on a jumphead for a story about people who abuse their bodies by depriving themselves of a good night’s sleep.

Sleeplessness from self-abuse, expert says

To which one of the backshop guys said, “yeah, that always keeps me up nights.”

On stand, she’s Rosie the Riveting

Another of those Lenoesque lists of headline hilarity. Most you’ve seen before, I’m sure.

Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told

Miners Refuse to Work after Death

Safety Experts Say School Bus Passengers Should Be Belted

Is There a Ring of Debris around Uranus?

Stud Tires Out

Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over


More here.

Blanp exposes widespread abuses.

Testy Copy Editors on whether the twain should meet. The post I most agree with:

It seems a better way of looking at headlines is not to say, “Heads are like poetry” but to say, “Heads are like prose,” by which I mean ordinary speech or writing; that would help weed out a lot of the shitty “cutesy” crap that often confuses The Reader (and the slot) but always seems to make contest judges happy; or even the jargon laden, headlinese that creeps in to some heads without giving The Reader any room to breath (and you know the kind of crap I mean).