A selection of headlines from my past

 

Top ten ways to pay for the wall

1) Naming rights. Sell the right to sponsor different sections of the wall. Imagine the name recognition value of, say, Doritos on a section of the wall. And the publicity value of hundreds of young people walking around wearing "I scaled the Doritos Border Wall" T-shirts. There would be a mad scramble to lasso the rights to many sections. In fact, it would probably be so successful that companies like Western Union might even advertise on the walls of tunnels under the wall so that migrants would know immediately the best place to wire money back to Honduras.

2) Reality TV. "Survivor: the Migrant Caravan," and that's just for starters. Send a camera crew and two "tribes" down to Honduras and follow them north with various challenges along the way, such as the "Don't drink the water" challenge in which the prize is a six-pack of Aquafina, and the losing team is filmed with Montezuma's Revenge. And that's just the beginning. Advertisers would flock to "Beeg brother," with the revenue going to buy voluminous volumes of steel slats.

3) Solar panels: Build a wall and cover it with solar panels. According to the Solar Panel Association, such a wall, with an initial cost of $5.7 billion, would pay for itself in 60 years, 30 if giant floodlights are shined on the wall to make sure no migrants are climbing over it..

4) YouTube advertising. Build a 2,000-mile, 150 foot wall with a six-inch wide strip on top and have border patrol agents ride motorcycles along the top with go pro cameras strapped to their helmet, then play the videos on YouTube where they're sure to go viral, and raise $5.7 billion in advertising revenue. There might even be enough left over to pay for the funerals of dozens of border patrol agents who fail to negotiate the turn at Yuma, Arizona.

5) Build the wall and make Russia pay for it, by convicting Russia of meddling in the 2016 election and seizing all the Trump properties that were purchased by oligarchs.

6) Tax the rich. Impose a 70 to 80 percent tax on those making more than $10 million a year. Oh wait, the money raised that way has to go to pay for repairing bridges and roads, not creating a useless wall.

7) Commemorative bricks. Allow families to purchase an engraved brick with the name of a loved one who has been a victim of violence perpetrated by an illegal immigrant who snuck over the southern border. This might take several decades, since there would only be a potential group of five or six such bricks. More such bricks might be available if families who lost a loved one to the opioid epidemic were allowed to purchase them, but such bricks would need an asterisk noting that 95 percent of fentanyl sold on the black market in America came from China.

 8) You were expecting more? Trump can't even come up with one way to pay for the wall. Thank God.

The Bread Man of Alcatraz

   I was in Costco the other day and decided to try this "Dave's Killer Bread" that my former colleague and current food blogger Victor mentions every two or three posts, like it's some kind of culinary cult, so I put one of the double loaves in my cart. Sure enough, I had only traveled two or three aisles when one of the Costco sample server ladies spotted the loaves in my cart and proceeded to tell me the story of Dave's Killer Bread while I sampled a bacon and cheddar pierogi.
   Dave's parents owned a bakery, she said, and ever since his mother had "something in the oven," that something being Dave, he wanted to grow up to bake bread. But in his youth Dave turned out to be a bad seed, was in and out of trouble, and finally his parents threw him out. While he was homeless and drifting about, he would find a bakery, wait until it closed, climb in through the roof or jimmy his way in through a window, bake some bread and then leave. Until one day he fell asleep in a Dunkin Donuts and suddenly he heard a loud 'Time to make the donuts!' and the jig was up."
   "He got arrested?" I asked.
   "The judge looked at his priors and threw the book at him," she said. "He got sentenced to 15 years in prison."
   "Wow," I said, "the poor guy. What was the charge?"
   "Baking and entering," she said. "But luckily, he got a job in the prison kitchen, where he met a lifer who had developed a secret recipe for baking what he called 30 to Life Bread. Thirty to Life was so popular among the inmates that some of them would beat up other inmates just so they'd be punished by getting nothing but bread and water."
   "Wow," I said, "can I have another pierogi?"
   "Sure," the sample lady said. "This lifer's bread was so popular..."
   "How popular was it?" I asked.
   "It was so popular," she said, "that seven death row inmates requested peanut butter and banana sandwiches on 30 to Life for their last meal, and one of them had his sentence commuted when his lawyer argued that the prison substituted Pepperidge Farm 15 grain bread."
   "That's pretty impressive," I said, "but how did Dave get the recipe?"
   "He bought it from the lifer for a carton of cigarettes," she said, and 14 years later, when he was released, he convinced his parents that he was reformed and they took him back into the family bakery. The rest is history."
   "That's quite a story," I said. "He should write a book."
   "He already did," she said.
   "What's it called?" I asked.
   "The Bread Man of Alcatraz."

Some headline writing tips

Twenty-three years ago! Thanks, Bill Hogan, for the great illustration

   A colleague who's relatively new to the newspaper biz recently asked me for some tips on writing headlines, so here goes.

   First, there's a paradox. Copy editors write headlines. As a copy editor, your job is to protect and defend the English language. What is that comma doing over here? I'm going to put it over there. Voila! Your job is also to make mundane copy sing like Beyonce. As a headline writer, your job often is to mangle that English language. Trump invited Tom Cruise to play golf? Headline: Trump considers climate Scientologist. And yet, the copy editor and headline writer are one and the same.

   Second, these tips apply primarily to print journalism. A print headline should present the essence of a story in a handful of words, sort of like in a crossword puzzle: What's a four word phrase that means Number 1 on the FBI's list of most wanted criminals has been apprehended ... hmm ... did I say apprehended? I meant caught ... no, nabbed, Most wanted guy nabbed, there you have it, although on the Entertainment page that might also apply to the conclusion of The Bachelor. Online the headline acts more as clickbait. "Why was this guy nabbed?" (Click here and find out).

   These suggestions don't apply universally. You have to use your judgment. If a story is about a budget, you ought to play it straight: Town Council rejects $262 million budget," not "Council has a cow," although atop a column that might be appropriate.

   That said, here are some tips gleaned from 50 years of getting yelled at by supervisors:

1) The overline. One of the opportunities to use a bit of creativity is in the headline that goes above a "standalone" picture, standalone being a photo in which the entire story is included in the caption. Take the picture of an oversize replica of a check being presented to a charity. "Bikers donate X thousand dollars to fight cancer." Nothing at all wrong with that. But if you publish the same picture, different check, different recipient, day after day, you might want to vary it a bit. "Check this check out out," or "Lions take a bite out of cancer." What you want to do is focus on a key word, like "Lions" or "Kiwanis" or check, and come up with a bit of alliteration or play on a word that anchors the overline.

2) Free association. Early in his career Alex Rodriguez came to be known as A-Rod. Then A-Rod begat K-Rod (Frankie Rodriguez? Wait, where did the K come from? Oh, that's the symbol for strikeouts.) But then ... A-Rod becomes embroiled in a steroid scandal, and now he's A-Roid. You see where this is going? Playing with names depends on how recognizable the name is, but this applies to words as well.

3) Copy editors get no respect. They're the Rodney Dangerfields of the newspaper business. Once  the copy editor  got a modicum of respect: In big city union shops, they were at a slightly higher pay grade than reporters, but as contracts were negotiated, that difference was whittled away until reporters gained parity. But reporters are visible, copy editors not so. Over my decades in this business, I've seen many reporters start out covering municipal stuff, then some municipal figure runs for office, and the next thing you know a reporter who covered him or her is their spokesperson, or some government agency that a reporter covered needs a communications director, nobody ever calls the copy editor with a job offer. There are a hundred career-making investigative reports for every headless body found in a topless bar. That said, the headline is the most visible element of a copy editor's job. Nobody ever says "Great comma," but a clever headline will at least elicit peer recognition and bring a bit of satisfaction to a thankless job.

4) A word of caution. Just like some people become addicted to crossword puzzles or Sudoku, over a great many years I've become addicted to writing headlines. I can't see a development in the news without mentally writing a headline for it. Case in point, see above, when Trump fired Pruitt, within eight seconds I'm thinking he should hire Tom Cruise because he's a Climate Scientologist. But the mixing and mangling of words, the creation of new words by adding on to old words, the deployment of double and triple entendres, is the stuff of which good headlines are made. Once when an auto maker was going to retire a number of models, the headline I came up with is an example of this: The Jurassic Parking Lot. A few letters here, a suffix there, and you can work magic. It used to help having a page designer who had a sense of humor, but now page designers and copy editor/headline writers are one and the same, so if you have an idea for a creative headline, you can tweak the layout to accommodate it. How cool is that?

5) The best headlines I've ever seen. And these were not written by me. 1) Mila Andre, a Russian emigre working as a copy editor at the New York Daily News, was assigned to edit a review of a new Russian restaurant named Caucasus. Her headline? "Ve vas hungry, Soviet." This was before the breakup of the Soviet Union, mind you. It also got poor Mila chewed out by the copy desk chief, who told her it had nothing to do with the quality of the food. Her response? It made people read the review. 2) My late colleague Ed Reiter, who was treated horribly by the management of the Bergen Record after he recovered from a stroke, was assigned a story about an invasion of slimy creatures in lawns and gardens around northern New Jersey. His headline: "Slugfest in the Garden." 3) The late Hal Frankel, who was a revered copy editor at the Daily News and I always considered a mentor, following the New York Giants' victory in the 1986 Super Bowl, when the News ran a two-page spread and a story about how they were going to hold a celebration in Giants Stadium and all the fans were going to be given kazoos so they could make some noise. Hal's headline? In I'd say 180 point type across two pages: "Start spreading kazoos" 4) On the opposite end of the spectrum, a little  two paragraph story came across the News copy desk about a woman who advertised her colon cleansing skills on the back page of the Village Voice. The woman was arrested when one of her clients failed to survive the cleansing. The little 18 or 24 point headline written by Joe whose last name I can't remember, was: "Public enema number one."

We interrupt this blog for a comment. I can't stand it. A former colleague just posted a lovely picture of greenery on her facebook page with the notation "The lysimachia is up in our front yard. In the backyard, the phlox is beginning to open." And like a reflex I started typing (although I caught myself and stopped), Don't let the phlox get too close to the henhouse. But this is what I mean, writing headlines too long can be addictive.

And how could I forget one of my early all-time faves, written by an elderly copy editor named Lester Rose when I was just starting out at the Daily News circa 1980. This is similar to that giant check that keeps appearing in charity photos, except this was the back page of the Daily News where the main headline through baseball season always had YANKS or METS, and one other team in ALL CAPS, in probably 150 point type, which left room for one other five to eight letter word in the middle. Often on the radio when you listen to the sports scores you'll hear the announcer try to come up with fifteen or so different ways to say "wins," usually riffing on the name of the winning or losing team. So one day the Yankees were playing the Milwaukee Brewers, and Lester's imaginative was: MILWAUKEE WISCS YANKS. Lester finally did retire not long after that, and I eventually got kicked out of the sports department and wound up on the suburban copy desk, but that's another story.

   There are some more tips and tricks for writing headlines. I'll get to those in a future post. Now excuse me while I answer the door.

Knock knock
Who's there?
Lysimachia
Lysimachia who?
Lysimachia vote Democratic in November

A total eclipse of the brain

Desk clerk: Good morning, Buffalo Hilton. How may I help you?

Me: I'd like to make a reservation for April 7, 2024

Desk clerk: That would be our Eclipse Special

Me: Oh, there's an eclipse then? I was just looking for a place to celebrate my 103rd birthday.

Desk clerk: We have just one room left.

Me: Whew, just in time. And what's the rate?

Desk clerk: One thousand forty nine dollars and twenty-three cents.

Me: One thousand forty nine dollars? That's outrageous. I could get the presidential/honeymoon/royal suite  for half that.

Desk clerk: And twenty-three cents. But you get 20 percent off at our breakfast buffet.

Me: What will they be serving?

Desk clerk: Bacon, we have an omelette bar, croissants, biscuits with sausage gravy ...

Me: Thank you, but I'll just watch the eclipse, if like you say there is one, on TV

Desk clerk: The Eclipse Special room has a 44-inch flat screen LSD television.

Me: Why would I want to watch an eclipse on TV if I'm paying a thousand dollars to see it live?

Desk clerk: And forty nine dollars and twenty-three cents.

Me: I'm calling Motel 6.

Desk clerk: They've been booked solid for that date for the past three years. Perhaps you'd like our Lunar Eclipse package for January 30 2018.

Me: What's the difference between a solar and a lunar eclipse?

Desk clerk: About eight hundred dollars.

Me: And twenty-three cents? I meant what's the difference in viewing experience?

Desk clerk: A lunar eclipse is way more intense, because it only occurs when the sun comes between the moon and earth. If it happens at night, the moon disappears but the earth lights up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

Me: Doesn't it get hot when the sun is that close to earth?

Desk clerk: During the last lunar eclipse, I was able to fry an egg on my forehead. But your room has solar powered air conditioning, and you still get 20 percent off our buffet breakfast.


Me: Why would I want a buffet breakfast when I can fry an egg on my forehead?

Desk clerk: Because your plastic cutlery is likely to melt.

Me: Are you in the path of totality for the lunar eclipse?

Desk clerk: According to Scientific Armenian, we'll have 99 and 44/100 percent totality.

Me: Are you sure of that?

Desk clerk: I'm 80 percent sure.

Me: If you're 80 percent sure it will be 99 and 44/100 percent totali -- oh heck, I'll take it.

Desk clerk: That will be two hundred twenty six dollars and 23 cents.

Me: What if it's cloudy when the moon gets 99 and 44/100 percent eclipsed? Do I get a refund?

Desk clerk: We're offering weather insurance.

Me: And how much is that?

Desk clerk: Eight hundred dollars and twenty-three cents.

Me: In other words I'm still out a thousand dollars if I want to see a lunar eclipse.

Desk clerk: And twenty three cents.

- - -

47 reasons to stick your head inside the mouth of a saltwater crocodile

47) Take the picture, dammi -- ouch!

46) Your estate can collect the $5,000 reward for that missing chihuahua

45) Think how you'll look on the wall of Mr. Crocodile's croc cave

44) I'll bet this livestream goes viral. Now where's that darn record button . . .

43) Can you hear me now? I said there is only one tRuth!

42) What a great way to complete your bucket list

41) 5 bars, wow! Hello Mom, guess where I am ...

   We interrupt this list with a comment on headlines. Orange may be the new black, but in the world of headlines, 20, maybe 30, even 47 is the new 10. Back in the day when David Letterman made the Top 10 list popular, newspapers and the fledgling Internet were discovering the popularity of lists. But  whereas newspapers and magazines, where print, and in the case of magazines, glossy paper, were at a premium, 10, even 5, items on a list would suffice, web sites were learning to be sticky.
   I mention this because when I launched my first web site, tankbooks.com, which contained a wealth of stories and interviews from my conversations with World War II veterans, sometimes I would get an email from a visitor saying he read everything on the site. Someone I told this to said my web site was sticky. That was a good thing, he said, because the stickier a site was, the longer visitors would stay on the site, and the more any advertising on the site would be in front of their eyes.
   A few years ago, most lists on the Internet were still at 10. But then when the list titles got more compelling, and the web sites on which they appeared grew more ad-centric, throwing a big ad for something in between every three slides, or popping a video or a big ad between every few paragraphs, ten just wasn't cutting it anymore.
   The result? A veritable slew of sticky sites ... "20 of the Most Terrifying Animals in Australia" ... "30 Rare Photos of North Korea" ... "120 Bald-Faced Lies Told By Donald Trump ... Make That 121" ...

40) Wait ... This isn't a plush toy?"

39) Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

38) This is sure to get you a promotion to Lieutenant in the Fail Army.

37) Maybe even to general.

Q. What does a baby crocodile like for breakfast?  A. Lady fingers

36) Double dog dare me, will you?

35) I'll find that White House leak if it's the last thing I do!

34) I said "Let them eat cake," I didn't say the chef at Mar-a-Lago was going to bake it.

33) I thought this was an animatronic crocodile, now where's the plug? Uh-oh ...

32) So this is where all those absentee ballots that voted for Gore wound up.

31) No I'm not a Packers fan. What do you mean you ordered a Cheesehead?

Listen to sample tracks

30) Did I say 47 reasons? Help me out here, #FrederickClemens

29) Your bff is filming it for the Croc Challenge

28) You can't wait to tag five of your Facebook friends

27) Think these are getting lame? You should see the first 40 of the 50 Scariest Scenes in "The Sound of Music" list.

26) This should greatly improve your chances of getting the starring role in Crocodile Dundee IV

25) A great way to protect your eyes during the solar eclipse?

24) You might become the first person to receive a head transplant.

23) Then again you might not.

Check out Aaron's Amazon author page

22) Are we there yet?

21) No I don't come with a side of bloomin' onions.

20) Stick your head inside the mouth of a saltwater crocodile and kiss your dandruff goodbye.


19) You could set the Guinness record for world's shortest reality TV show.

18) Cut! Okay, you've got that cameo on Game of Thrones. I said Cut! Cut! Uh-oh...

17) What do you mean tastes like chicken?

16) Michael Rockefeller, I presume?

15) I think I just found the remains of Malaysia Air Flight 370. What a meal that must have been.

14) So you think you're the toughest saltwater crocodile east of Australia? Bite me.

13) On second thought. . .

12) Or should that be west of Australia?

11) Just one more take, and I'll show those producers that "Saltwater Crocodile Lagoon" will make "Shark Tank" look like the SS Minnow.

10) The game warden says this fellow is a vegan crocodile and only eats non-GMO people ... wait a minute, I'm non-GMO ... thank you Monsanto.

9) Help! My head is stuck in a bucket of Country Crock.

8) Holy Molar Batman! This guy's got more choppers than a Harley franchise.

7) If I can make this sale I'll be the dental implant salesman of the year!

6) Look Ma, I'm on the cover of the National Geographic!

5) Help me out here, #FrederickClemens, finishing this list is like pulling teeth

4) Go ahead and laugh, but according to climatologists, these puppies will be roaming the streets of downtown Miami by 2050.

3) What do you mean, I bring out the wildebeest in you?

2) No, that's not a crowbar in my pocket, I'm happy to see you.

And the No. 1 reason to stick your head inside the mouth of a saltwater crocodile (like you haven't scrolled down already) . . .


1) Live, from Lake Okeechobee, it's Saturday Night!

Check out this free World War II oral history sampler from an earlier post

Momma, don't let your babies grow up to be micro managers

   It's kind of a given that copy editors make mistakes. In many cases, a copy editor is the last line of defense from errors, but when correcting an error, a copy editor might introduce a new error, for instance, when rewriting a caption, he or she might misspell a word or name. Often, there is a reason a mistake was made or might have been avoided. I remember a time that a colleague of mine was called on the carpet, had the riot act read to him, and got reamed (figuratively, not literally) because a story he edited had the phrase "Jew Jersey" which appeared in the paper.
   How could that have happened?
   A little forensic copy editing would have shown that there was a recent rule passed by someone who enjoyed making up rules, kind of like our current embarrassment of a president, that, and I forget the exact wording of the edict, but that we on the copy desk were no longer to use N.J. in certain circumstances and had to write out New Jersey. Not a big deal, but the copy editor in question was simply following the rules.
   A forensic examination of the keyboard, however, will reveal that the letter "J" is above the letter "N" and 50 percent to the right. I believe the term is catty corner.

Oops, wrong catty corner

 

Okay, correct keyboard. Note the position of the n and the j.

   So ... when following the new rule and thinking he was acting correctly, he accidentally depressed the "J" rather than the "N" and the result: Jew Jersey, for which said copy editor got his ass handed to him over a nothing little mistake that never would have occurred in the first place had a supervisor not been micro managing.
   That was then. This is now.
   The newspaper where I work has gone through a succession of managing editors in the few years I've been there.
   An email that arrived, addressed to the entire copy editing staff, particularly got under my skin. It contained the phrase "How did this happen" when all the managing editor had to do was ask me, as said managing editor knew that I had laid out the page, and I would have explained how it happened, but the point of sending the email to the entire copy desk was to reassert said managing editor's control by humiliating the alleged error maker.
   If this were the first "how did this happen" email it would have been like the proverbial water off a duck's back, but this is a pretty regular occurrence, so I decided to ask Mr. Google what are the characteristics of a micro manager, and the answer, although I am sure there are variations, fit this micro manager to a T.

6 Characteristics of a Micro Manager

   I've made my share of mistakes, some of them clunkers. And I don't humiliate easily, so I wasn't humiliated by this particular email. But I did have my eyes opened to what is at times a stifling workplace environment. I'm not enough of an expert to say micro managing is any worse in a newspaper environment than it is in a corporate environment. But copy editors are often creative people, and micro managing in a newsroom stifles that creativity. The article points out that there is often a fine line between micro managing and effective leadership. There is also sometimes a hairline between an excellent, creative headline and a clunker of a headline, but if you don't consider the clunkers, you may never write the great ones.

PS: Thank you Victor Sasson for the kind mention in your excellent and evolving blog "The Sasson Report."