Man With No Lines in Head Writes Headlines

   

Play it again, Sam

   When I recently sent a link to my last post to the CCNY Communications Alumni group on Linked-In, Sam Gronner suggested I let the group know when I write a post concerning my alma mater. I started out as a DIY blogger -- that is, no Blogspot, no Wordpress, I just called a section of my web site "Aaron's Blog" and did it myself. I made a few posts, which required a great deal of linking back and forth, and had none of the bells and whistles that the two main blog arenas offer.

   You won't find those entries unless you follow a series of links to pages which are no longer linked to from the main page, and you won't find them from this blog. So I'll reprint, with a couple of minor edits, one of my first entries from what would eventually become this blog.

   Nov. 19, 2008 -- When I was a teenager riding the subway to Stuyvesant High School from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, long before New York Magazine dubbed it the Yupper West Side; in fact, just a few blocks from where I lived on West 89th Street was 84th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues, which some civic organization trumpeted as the worst block in all of New York City, and to think we moved to the Upper West Side from Hell's Kitchen. Riding the subway I would crane my neck over riders' shoulders to read the headlines in the New York Post and the Daily News, little thinking that I would one day be writing those headlines myself, and gazing in wonder at the origami-esque wizardry of the mostly men in suits who neatly folded the New York Times so that they could manage reading it on the subway.

    As a freshman at the City College of New York, I joined The Campus, one of two student newspapers at the school. The first story I was assigned to write was about a series of old movies to be shown in the South Campus cafeteria. When I opened the paper, a photo from a movie I didn't recognize accompanied my story along with a headline that said, "Welcome now to Rick's cafe."

    I was like, "Huh?"

     I can't tell you how long I resisted writing or even saying things like "I was like 'Huh?'" because it seemed a bastardization of the English language, but everywhere I turned someone was saying "I was like, 'This'," or "I was like, 'That'," and so finally the phrase just slipped out of my mouth, and then it appeared on paper, but while I would leave it in the text of a story I was editing at the Bergen Record, I never entered it into copy myself, not because I didn't think it appropriate, but because it would then pass through the hands of an anally retentive supervisor who would turn red and accuse me of butchering the English language.

   Getting back to my freshman year at City, I took the copy of The Campus with my story in it to one of the paper's upperclasspersons, pointed to the headline and said, "I don't understand this."

    The upperclassperson was like "You're 17 years old and a New Yorker and you've never seen 'Casablanca'?"

    And so I learned my first lesson about headline writing -- a lesson with which several supervisors I  worked under over the decades would disagree. The lesson was give the reader credit for knowing a thing or two about popular culture. There was no mention in my story of Rick's cafe, but the headline writer assumed that anybody who was into old films -- especially at a culturally savvy school such as the City College of New York, which turned out such stars of stage and screen as Zero Mostel, Edward G. Robinson and Cornel Wilde, not to mention more nobel laureates than you could shake a wandful of pixie dust at -- would not only  know where Rick's Cafe was but could toss off lines like "Out of all the gin joints in all the world ... " without ever having been in a gin joint or having seen any of the world beyond the Bronx or Brooklyn. My first supervisor at the Bergen Record, the late beloved Bob Sumner, for all his warmth and nurturing, would have tossed that headline across the newsroom and made me go stand in the corner for 15 minutes because Rick's Cafe wasn't mentioned anywhere in the story.

    When I look back, "Welcome now to Rick's Cafe" was not a bad headline. It transports the reader not only into an article about the movie but into the movie itself. And if, like me at age 17, the reader doesn't know what or where Rick's Cafe is, then he or she can ask, or now, some four decades later, Google it.

    Good God, I take it all back. Google Rick's Cafe and the first thing that pops up is some upscale restaurant in Jamaica, and "Casablanca" doesn't come up until the seventh entry.* But if there hadn't been a Humphrey Bogart, the place probably would be called "Jamaica Joe's."

Thanks for reading.

 

*This was in 2008. Google Rick's Cafe today and Casablanca doesn't even make the first page.

Another nail in the coffin of my career

Two online headlines grabbed my attention this morning -- well, they didn't exactly grab it, I just threw that in as an action verb to grab your attention, they really just intrigued me. Most of the headlines I read these days are online since newspapers are too expensive for a 99er like me who doesn't know where his next month's minimum credit card payments are coming from. Ahh, those heady days when I was a card-carrying member of the middle class. But I digress.

The first was one of those heads that gave me pause ... that is, there was just something about it that didn't work, at least for me. "Chinese 'iPod' aims to skin Apple." The story was about some 22 year old whiz kid in China who designed a contraption that fits over an iPod Touch like an outer skin, and converts it into an iPhone, making for a much more cost effective iPhone than the iPhone itself. So yes, this was a skin for an iPod, but when you "skin" something, you're removing the skin, not adding it. Here we go again with the "poetic license" defense.

But that's neither here nor there. I'll give the headline writer credit for trying, for putting it out there to see if it works, whether it works or not. Sometimes you have to do that.

It was another head that troubled me, not because it was a poor headline, but because it was a good headline. A little background. The very first story I wrote as a cub reporter for The Campus, one of two school newspapers at the City College of New York, back in 1967 was about a series of old movies that were to be shown in the South Campus cafeteria. When I opened the paper and looked at the story, the headline said "Welcome now to Rick's Cafe." I was like "Huh?" Let me rephrase that. I was 17 years old and had never seen "Casablanca," a still from which accompanied the article.

The lesson I learned way back then was that a good copy editor has to keep abreast of culture. I can still remember the thrill I had at the New York Daily News the first time I was able to sneak the word "Yo!" into a headline, following the success of "Rocky." Don't ask me what the rest of the headline said, I don't remember. That was a long time ago, and that's the problem.

The headline that intrigued me today said "Police dare Switchfoot singer to move." My initial reaction was that this was some kind of "Are you feeling lucky, punk?" kind of story. It was actually about a singer for the band Switchfoot -- which I'd never heard of -- who gave an impromptu concert in Tampa after opening for the Goo Goo Dolls. At least I'd heard of them.

These days so many jobs in the media business have been merged that I'm guessing the writer wrote his own headline, just as copy editors now have to lay out the stories they edit, because it appeared that the last two paragraphs of the story were written to explain the headline.

Switchfoot, the writer noted, is a San Diego-based Christian rock group whose mainstream hit "Dare you to move" was featured on the U.K. version of the "Spiderman 2" soundtrack.

Well, I thought, so much for me keeping abreast of modern pop culture. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I hear the Christian rock ringtone on my iPod Touch phone.

THIS JUST IN: On the other hand, there are some advantages to being a dinosaur, in addition to being able to chow down on nerdy scientists. A teaser headline on aol.com that I saw only moments ago said "Tea Company Is Closing 25 Stores." Tea Company? Obviously, the tech-savvy youngster who wrote that could probably whistle the U.K. soundtrack for Spiderman 2 backward, but is too wet behind the ears to know that the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company is commonly referred to as A&P, not Tea Company. I'm reminded of the fool who created the New Jersey Turnpike sign directing travelers to the James Cooper rest area. That person probably thought Fenimore, who needs a middle name like that, when we can save a few bucks on the signage, but at least he wasn't a copy editor.