Why are headlines so bad?

Three reasons.

Needless to say, Kamala Harris didn’t commit murder 14 years ago. But you wouldn’t know it from this Washington Post headline.

In fact, as Kessler explains, the story is about Donald Trump’s campaign trying somehow make Harris shoulder the burden for a Texas murder committed by an undocumented migrant. Harris was the San Francisco D.A. at the time. “If viewers aren’t looking carefully at the date of the tombstone depicted at the start of the ad, they could easily conclude that this murder happened during the Biden administration as a result of its border policies,” Kessler writes.

True. They could also get a very mistaken impression from the headline on his piece.

A lot of media criticism these days boils down to "this headline” is bad and while it’s annoying to me as a journalist that people focus so much on headlines — they’re not the story! — it’s also a fact of life.

And a lot of headlines are bad. Really bad.

David Boardman, the dean of Temple University’s media and communications school, offers one idea:

It’s true! Copy-editing desks — filled with editors whose focus was on grammar and spelling and catching stray factual errors, and who often wrote the headlines with a demand for precision — have largely disappeared even from the best-remaining newspapers. The result is, well, slop.

But there are two other related factors, I believe¹:

* Key-word searching is all-important now. Instead of copy desks, a lot of outfits — from regional newspapers on up — have “growth” teams that are constantly tracking which stories are performing and what readers are searching for. The result is an approach to headline writing that focuses on making sure that keywords are prominent. For the Kessler story above, I imagine it was very important for the editor to make sure “Harris” and “murder” were in the headline, however awkwardly.

* Publications need you to click on headlines, not just complain about them. This has less to do with the political stories that we complain about and more to do with more general stuff — but it sure appears to me that one strategy these days is to make headlines that you have to click instead of just scrolling past, at least if you want the relevant information.

Here’s a headline today in a daily newsletter I receive:

In the old print days, we might have written something like “Lake Quivira leads list of best places to retire in Kansas.” But if you see that headline now, you have the information you need without clicking. No good! So. A mindset of “strategic vagueness” appears to have become part of the process of drawing eyeballs to stories.

Listen: Readers and reporters have complained about headlines forever. This was true before the digital age. It will be true forever. That’s because headlines compress a whole bunch of information into (usually) 10 words or less, in the process losing a lot of nuance that goes into the story itself. It’s always been an imperfect process. It’s just imperfect in a particular way now.

1. As a freelancer, I’m generally not privy to the behind-the-scenes processes of the publications I work for - that’s proprietary information! - but I’ve been doing this awhile, so.