A quick note on headlines, following on the point in the other exchanges. Headlines are obviously important on a number of levels. The fact that they're individually ephemeral is meaningless. They're particularly important in digital news (which is to say the overwhelming ...
2/ majority of news as we now consume it) because a great deal of news we absorb is headlines only. This was much less the case in old fashioned broadsheet newspaper reading because the article, the content is right there. We page through the paper, seeing the headlines ...
3/ and the stories. If you have any interest, you breeze right into the story itself. Digital news is different since you need to take a new affirmative step to click through and go to the article. This is not a minor technical point. I have the unique role of having been ...
4/ in journalism AND in the digital news publishing business for almost 25 years. Much of the success and failure of digital news enterprises is contained in that simple affirmative step, it's the axis around which the success and failure of publication turns. This is ...
5/ even more the case in the social media environment in which many of us now consume our news. Much of what we learn is in the form of headlines only, or headlines and a brief version of a subhed which constitutes the tweet. And much of the conversations spurred on ...
6/ social media comes from the headlines and often the headlines only. Now as a publisher and a journalist I know as well as anyone that good headline writing is difficult, especially in the context of what I just explained. That's a lot to fit into 7 or 8 words. And ...
7/ to a degree all the burden can't fall on the publications to work within what is arguably a superficial way of consuming news. It's complicated. Anyone in the news business will tell you that a lot rides on headlines and there are a lot of things you need to ...
8/ accomplish in just a few words. But for the purposes of this conversation pretending they don't matter is silly and condescending to readers. Much of the editorial power of a publication is contained in its headlines and the implicit value judgments they contain. Saying ...
9/ well, who cares, they're soon forgotten is silly. One can say the same thing about virtually all news journalism. The overall work is important; the individual examples are virtually all ephemeral, forgotten in hours or days.
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