There was a time in the annals of journalism education when professors would urge you to change majors if you insisted on writing question headlines.
Professors would shout it for the world to hear;
We are here to provide answers, not to ask questions!
I know that if my editing prof, the late and well remembered Dr. Arthur M. Sanderson, was around today, he would be taking his red grease pencil, the one with the string hanging around it, and mark my paper: No question headlines, please.
For the past two years I have noticed more question headlines than ever, and most of them on well known titles: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic.
Take a look here, please:
For the record: I could only find one question headline in The Wall Street Journal of the past two days.
Of course, my Columbia students also indulge in question headlines in their daily assignments. Forgive me, Dr. Sanderson, but I don’t seem to have the political capital to stop them as fiercely as you did with us. But, because I am old, I am entitled to remind them that it is usually best to provide answers.
I am told by many editors that, especially on mobile devices, question headlines tend to do the job best, enticing and seducing us to read the story.
Perhaps this is also the result of a world which is so complicated that all of us have more questions than answers.
Still, I would like to ask a question:
Why so many headlines that ask a question?
*And for those who may not be familiarized with the why of my headline: this is one of the funniest songs in a well known Broadway musical of its era, Wonderful Town, which opened in 1953.
Why, oh why, oh why, oh
Why did i ever leave ohio?
Cover with a type attack
This is an October 2018 cover of The Atlantic, but, while I had put it on my coffee table then, I did not discover it till this week. It is always interesting to see when art directors turn to a type attack as the design solution for a cover, in this case imitating the grid of a newspaper page. And all black and white.
TheMarioBlog post # 2997