The thrill and surprise of the non-templated headline, as per The New York Times
One rarely thinks of a template for headlines. I admit that I never gave headline templates a thought until I read this piece by Derek Thompson for The Atlantic.
Headlined “Why Internet Headline Writers Hate Themselves”, Thompson writes that while the best headline templates maximize
readership, they can also quickly become “ubiquitous, over-familiar, and cloying to their own writers.”
Whether we are reading a list of headlines for stories on Quartz, Circa, The New York Times or The Atlantic, we know that there are certain headline approaches that seduce instantly. Thompson refers to those, too:
• “Everything You Need to Know about [A]”
• “What [B] Tells Us About [C]”
• “The Amazing Truth About [D] in 1 (or 100) Graph(s)”
• “A Celebrity You Already Like Had the Perfect Response to [E]”
• “One Tweet Explains [F]”
• “[G] Occurred. You Won't Believe What Happened Next”
“These headline templates are everywhere. They are everywhere because they work. Then journalists (some of whom are directly responsible for their very ubiquity) become embarrassed at themselves for unleashing a flood of so-called perfect responses that are not in fact perfect and become self-loathing about the very thing they were instrumental in making.”
Especially in the ever so fast world of mobile storytelling, it is essential that we rely on some of these templates to produce editions as fast as the audience comes to look for it. There have been design templates for a long time, and most publications would not be able to make their deadlines (in whichever platform) if it wasn’t for those specific templates that are designed to allow for a smart editor to populate spaces already allocated based on story and photo count, as well as hierarchy.
Good designers know how to violate these templates to suit a special story or occasion. And that works beautifully, surprising the reader.
I imagine it is the same for headlines. While the templates are there to remind us of what has proved to work well in getting readers’ attention, it is still a wonderful surprise when we see a headline that is original, appropriate and NOT part of a template.
One recent far-from-the-template headline that I consider to be among the best comes from The New York Times:
Rand Paul Seeks Middle (Sorry, Dad)
In headline writing, as in design, originality and serendipity will always continue to be paramount, but we respect and encourage the use of templates for the 75% formula that we all aim for when publishing news, but the other 25%—the surprises— is what separates one title from another.