Does online kill the headline?

 
“Headline writing, of the clever, punning variety that is their stock in trade, is fast becoming an anachronism. For the role of subeditors is changing as media organisations do as the Sun has done and establish integrated newsrooms; producing papers, website, blogs and broadcasts from one desk,” wrote Janette Owen, for the Guardian.

The simple reality is that ‘clever’ headlines don’t fare as well online, due to their lack of visibility on search engines, since they seldom contain the magic keywords.

Of course, subeditors can always be retrained for search engine optimization (SEO), but they’ll inevitably have to lose some of the edginess that made them so valuable for the print paper.

This isn’t only the case for tabloids such as The Sun.

"Nine to 12 months ago, if you said 'SEO' to most of the (news) team, they would scratch their heads. Now it's a part of their job. We have to recognise that search is driving much of the behaviour on the web. Newspapers that don't understand that at the highest level simply won't exist," said Zach Leonard, digital media publisher of The Times, which gets between 30% and 60% of its traffic from search engines.

The main evolution is that the classic newspaper headline traditionally involves a pun or cultural reference, which often doesn’t efficiently translate on the Web for SEO.

However, online doesn’t necessarily imply the deterioration of great headlines, according to Sun executive editor Fergus Shanahan.

"All sensible and progressive parts of the newspaper industry accept it is not a question of consumers choosing either to buy a paper or obtain their news online: it is a mixture, not one or the other. So papers must try harder than ever to seize the attention of existing and potential readers. A really memorable headline on page one on a newsagent's stand is one of the best ways to achieve this."

"If subs are told to write headlines aimed at gaining hits on the internet, then I think that's a silly, short-sighted and possibly dangerous road to travel down. I expect subs to write good headlines based on the copy,” agreed Keith Howitt, production editor of the Independent on Sunday.

It seems the Guardian article omits another argument for the possible resilience for good headline writing in online editions: the use of tags. A newspaper’s online audience generally comes through a combination of search engines and homepage browsing. For the latter, newspapers must keep writing eye-catching headlines. But to catch search engines, they can simply tag in relevant keywords for each article, while keeping the poignant headline.

Source: Guardian