Journo Bites: Headline

If you believe news stories have titles, we might need a quick lesson on terminology. There is a huge difference, and I need to explain.

Hi! This is Journo Bites, a series of quick journalism tips from yours truly, so that bit by bit, you understand why journalists write and report their stories the way they do. Before I continue my explanation the difference between a title and a headline, please like RA vs the World on Facebook and visit this page to ask me any question about journalism that has been bugging you.

Now back to that topic.

If you read news regularly, you may have noticed that headlines are longer than your typical titles. Movie titles are short, unless they’re 1990s Filipino film. Song titles are short, unless they’re punk rock songs in the 2000s. Editorial articles—which are essays, not news articles—have short titles. Plays, rides, novels, you name it. They all have short titles. Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen has a long title, but that’s a different title.

Anyway…

News stories typically* do not have titles. They have headlines, which are supposed to be complete sentences as opposed to titles that may only have a subject or sometimes, just a predicate. In order for something to be called a headline. It has to be a complete sentence.

A complete sentence, as you were told in your elementary years, has a noun and a verb. In the case of headlines, these are sentences that are either in the present tense, or in the to-infinitive form. News stories about events that happened in the past will still have present tense headlines although obviously, the verbs in the news story will take the past tense. For stories about events that have yet to happen—anticipative news stories—we use to plus the base form of the verb, as in

Marcos to visit Typhoon Sara survivors

Headlines are also skeletonized. We typically do not write words like a, an, the, the verb to be, and we avoid words like of. In the headline above, we could have written, “Marcos to visit survivors of Typhoon Sara,” but in order to avoid using too much word, we interchanged “Typhoon Sara” and “survivors.”

By the way, please check out this other post about acronyms in news stories.

Headlines, therefore, use non-standard grammar. Journalists and editors craft them this way to save space and convey the essence of the news story in the fewest words possible. In newspapers, our headlines will only have one sentence without a period in the end. Online, the rules are totally different.

Journalists and editors are free to write headlines that read like this:

These are headlines from online news organizations Grist and Vox. Since they publish online, they don’t have to think of economizing space. Their journalists and editors, therefore, are free to write double-sentence headlines like the ones above.

In cases like these, the first sentence in the headline will end with a period or a question mark, and the second sentence will also end with a period or a question mark.

One last thing before I close this topic about headlines. I once was asked about a headline that reads somewhat like this:

De la Cruz arrested in beach resort

The arrested in this headline is a past participle of arrest. In this sentence, Juan de la Cruz is not the one doing the action. A journalist will write a headline like this if the person arrested is someone famous. The alternative would have been, “Cops arrest de la Cruz in beach resort,” which uses the present tense. However, that would be forgetting one of the values of news, which is prominence. Let’s say de la Cruz is famous, therefore, we write his name in the headline first. The body of the report will probably also mention his name first because of this very same reason.

That’s it. That’s all I have about headlines for now. If you have questions, you can always use the contact form below this page. I’ll gladly answer your journalism questions. O:)

BTW, if you noticed that I used “typically” here, it means that in rare cases, some editors will choose a title over a headline, but this is more of a practice in features rather than hard news. Feature stories, by the way, are just news stories—just softer. That’s a topic for another day.

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