Headline

: "Airfleet Ordered to W. Va. Battlefield" A headline is the text indicating the content or nature of the article below it, typically a news piece, by providing a form of brief summary of its contents. 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. 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".

: "Airfleet Ordered to W. Va. Battlefield" A headline is the text indicating the content or nature of the article below it, typically a news piece, by providing a form of brief summary of its contents. 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. 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". ==Production== at the end of World War I. A headline's purpose is to quickly and briefly draw attention to the story. It is generally written by a copy editor, but may also be written by the writer, the page layout designer, or other editors. The most important story on the front page above the fold may have a larger headline if the story is unusually important. The New York Times 21 July 1969 front page stated, for example, that "MEN WALK ON MOON", with the four words in gigantic size spread from the left to right edges of the page. Headlines may sometimes be divided into multiple "decks" of varying type size, each on a separate line. Grant Milnor Hyde notes that some historic headlines could contain up to twenty decks. In the United States, headline contests are sponsored by the American Copy Editors Society, the National Federation of Press Women, and many state press associations; some contests consider created content already published, others are for works written with winning in mind. ==Research== A study indicates there has been a substantial increase of sentiment negativity and decrease of emotional neutrality in headlines across written popular U.S.-based news media since 2000. Another study concluded that those who have gained the most experience with reading newspapers "spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines—rather than reading [all or most of] the stories". Headlines can bias readers toward a specific interpretation and readers struggle to update their memory in order to correct initial misconceptions in the cases of misleading or inappropriate headlines. One approach investigated as a potential countermeasure to online misinformation is "attaching warnings to headlines of news stories that have been disputed by third-party fact-checkers", albeit its potential problems include e.g. that false headlines that fail to get tagged are considered validated by readers. ==Criticism== ===Sensationalism, inaccuracy and misleading headlines=== ===="Slam"==== The use of "slam" in headlines has attracted criticism on the grounds that the word is overused and contributes to media sensationalism. The violent imagery of words like "slam", "blast", "rip", and "bash" has drawn comparison to professional wrestling, where the primary aim is to titillate audiences with a conflict-laden and largely predetermined narrative, rather than provide authentic coverage of spontaneous events. ===Crash blossoms=== "Crash blossoms" is a term used to describe headlines that have unintended ambiguous meanings, such as The Times headline "Hospitals named after sandwiches kill five". The word 'named' is typically used in headlines to mean "blamed/held accountable/named [in a lawsuit]", but in this example it seems to say that the hospitals' names were related to sandwiches. The headline was subsequently changed in the electronic version of the article. The term was coined in August 2009 on the Testy Copy Editors web forum after the Japan Times published an article entitled "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms" (since retitled to "Violinist shirks off her tragic image"). ==Headlinese== issue of May 29, 1916. Headlinese is an abbreviated form of news writing style used in newspaper headlines. Because space is limited, headlines are written in a compressed telegraphic style, using special syntactic conventions, including: Forms of the verb "to be" and articles (a, an, the) are usually omitted. Most verbs 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" The conjunction "and" is often replaced by a comma, as in "Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap". Individuals are usually specified by surname only, with no honorifics. Organizations and institutions are often indicated by metonymy: "Wall Street" for the US financial sector, "Whitehall" for the UK government administration, "Madrid" for the government of Spain, "Davos" for the World Economic Forum, and so on. Many abbreviations, 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. Lack of a terminating full stop (period) even if the headline forms a complete sentence. Use of single quotation marks 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. 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. Another technique is to present the claim as a question, hence Betteridge's law of headlines. Some periodicals have their own distinctive headline styles, such as Variety and its entertainment-jargon headlines, most famously "Sticks Nix Hick Pix". ===Verb heads=== American headline writers sometimes left the grammatical subject out of a headline so that it began with a verb. The subject was either included in a lower deck, or even omitted entirely for the reader to infer. For example "Sues Doctor for $50,000" as the top deck of the headline, followed by "Woman Alleges He Caused Her Arrest on Charge of Insanity" in the second deck. Robert E. Garst and Theodore Menline Bernstein's 1933 manual Headlines and Deadlines described "the not infrequent omission of the grammatical subject in the top". The 1961 edition changed this to "the occasional omission". Both editions called the construction "somewhat short of being ideal". From the 1950s onward, editing textbooks referred to them as "verb heads" and noted that some papers used them while others banned them. In 1972 John B. Bremner stated they had declined in use due to wider columns. He noted however that some large papers were still using them, including The Des Moines Register and The Kansas City Star, and that The New York Times still allowed them if the subject was included at the start of a lower deck. ===Commonly used short words=== To save space and attract attention, headlines often use extremely short words, many of which are not otherwise in common use, in unusual or idiosyncratic ways: ace (a professional, especially a member of an elite sports team, e.g. "England ace") axe (to eliminate) bid (to attempt) blast (to heavily criticize) cagers (basketball team – "cage" is an old term for indoor court) chop (to eliminate) coffer(s) (a person or entity's financial holdings) confab (a meeting) eye (to consider) finger (to accuse, blame) fold (to shut down) gambit (an attempt) hail (to praise, welcome) hike (to increase, raise) ink (to sign a contract) jibe (an insult) laud (to praise) lull (a pause) mar (to damage, harm) mull (to contemplate, consider) nab (to acquire, arrest) nix (to reject) pan (to criticize, review negatively) parley (to discuss) pen (to write) probe (to investigate; investigation) quiz (to question, interrogate) raft (package, series; e.g. "raft of new powers to tackle crime") rap (to criticize) romp (an easy victory or a sexual encounter) row (an argument or disagreement) rue (to lament) see (to forecast) shape (to be healthy or fit) slay (to murder) slam (to heavily criticize) slump (to decrease) snub (to reject) solon (to judge) spat (an argument or disagreement) spark (to cause, instigate) star (a celebrity, often modified by another noun, e.g. "soap star") tap (to select, choose) tot (a child) tout (to put forward) woe (disappointment or misfortune) ===Works cited===

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