The worst headline I ever wrote

The line between a really really good headline, the kind that makes readers say to their buds "Did you see that headline in the Such and Such?" as opposed to "Did you see that story in the Such and Such?" -- and a really really bad headline is a thin one, razor thin you might say. I walked that line for years and have the stripes on my soles to prove it. Figuratively speaking, of course, I mean I did tend to wear socks in the newsroom, although the Orange County Register used to take out a front page ad in Editor & Publisher showing its copy editors sitting at their desks on the beach, and I'll bet they have the jellyfish stings to prove it. But I digress.

Sometimes a headline looks good on a computer screen but loses in the translation to print, because a word is pronounced differently in common usage than it may appear phonetically on paper. That generally makes for a clunky, albeit not a terrible, headline. In general, really really bad headlines cross a different kind of line, not one that separates funny from not funny, but rather good taste from bad.

Which brings me to what I've always felt was one of the better headlines I wrote, and what I believe may be one of the worst. First the good one, so to speak. It never got published, but that's another story, which I'll relate here so as not to keep anybody guessing.

The Bergen Record was breaking in a new backup slot person, a young copy editor who'd been on the staff for a couple of years, a decent all-around editor although he tended to miss a lot of the nuances in stories that required massaging, and his headlines were somewhat less than inspired. But he had an affable personality and a seemingly good future at the paper, which has proved true -- he's now some kind of assistant news editor and is one of the few "good guys" on a largely dysfunctional editorial staff. But I was a former backup slot person and was perceived as a "loose cannon," and the copy chief and his deputy were wary that I might try to undermine the new backup's authority, which couldn't have been farther from the case.

However, I did give him a hard time over a headline. It was what in the vernacular was called an "overline" for a picture, the little headline that goes on top of a photo while the caption goes below. Honda at the time had a big advertising campaign for its redesigned Accord, and the theme was "Introducing the Honda Accord," which of course had been around for decades but the word "introducing" made it seem newer. The day of the headline in question was an exceptionally windy one, and a photographer had captured a picture of a parked 18-wheeler that got blown over onto its side, crushing an unoccupied Honda Accord. The key word here, to me at least, is unoccupied. The owner wasn't in the car, and wasn't even in the picture.

Sometimes you have to scramble your brain to come up with a good line -- I spent about eight months faithfully submitting entries to the New Yorker's cartoon caption writing contest and never even got an honorable mention -- and sometimes a headline "Wham!" just plain kind of smacks you in the head, no pun intended. This was one of those Whams. Onto my computer screen, almost without thinking, I typed: "Introducing the Honda Accordion." I then wrote a modest caption and hit the send button.

A short while later, my message light started blinking, and I called up a note from the in-training backup slot person, who often was given my copy to slot because it was generally clean and not likely to get him in trouble for missing the kind of stuff that might get the paper sued. "We can't run this," the note said. "Somebody might have gotten hurt."

"Might." This is the operative word here. Nobody was in the car, and, without thinking, I quietly went ballistic. I fired off a note to the copy chief saying "We've got to talk," and after the edition was put to bed -- another silly newspaper term -- the copy chief, deputy copy chief, new backup slot person and I had a conference, at which I went ballistic a little more loudly and the interpretation was that I was obviously attempting to undermine the new backup's authority. Which I can see made a lot of sense, but I was really only defending my headline. I later realized the dynamic at play and wished I had acted in a more subdued fashion. But in general I would prefer a copy editor to take enough pride in his or her work to argue over a rejected headline rather than "dumb it down" to avoid getting any grief.

But that is neither here nor there. If somebody was sitting in the Accord and had their head turned into a pancake, I never would have written a humorous headline. Unless, maybe, the 18-wheeler was delivering a load of maple syrup. Just kidding.

This episode, however, broaches the subject of good taste/poor taste, which brings me to what may have been the worst headline I ever wrote, several years earlier at the New York Daily News, not because it wasn't a clever headline, but because in this case, people did get hurt, killed even.

A couple of days earlier, there had been a deadly tornado in Texas, 24 people were killed. At the time, it was one of the deadliest tornadoes in years, although there have been many deadly tornadoes since. But it was big news at the time and stayed in the front pages for a few days. On the second or third day, somebody pulled a dog alive out of the rubble of a building. The headline I submitted, which wound up in the paper along with a picture of the dog and its rescuer, was: "Toto! Toto! You're Alive."

That was in poor taste. Very bad taste. I admit it. But I wrote it and learned from it, although I don't think the impact of the lesson sank in for several years, like an epiphany, I just woke up one day and thought, "Gee, that headline was in really bad taste."

Which is not to say that a copy editor shouldn't walk that line between good headline/bad headline, good taste/poor taste. It may take years to develop the instincts that keep you on the good headline side most of the time, but the journey is worth it.

Rhymes With Hyperbole

I once had an argument with a colleague at the Daily News Tonight. I don't remember whether I won the argument or lost it, but I think I won it not because I was right, which of course I was, but because I was in the slot. The argument was over the headline on a sports story about some big event, it might have been a Super Bowl or a World Series or a boxing match, and the copy editor wrote a headline stating something to the effect that this was going to be like "World War 3." I also forget whether he used the word "like," but I said to him, "You can't write that."

"Why not?" he shot back.

Now I might note here that this was at the height of the Cold War, or at least during it, since I really don't know where the height of the Cold War was, maybe the Bay of Pigs, or the shootdown of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane, or the Cuban Missile Crisis -- that sounds about right -- but I digress.

"This is a sporting event," I said. I might have used the word "game." "World War 3, that's atomic bombs blowing up all over the place, nuclear winter, your grandmother evaporating before your eyes, fireballs, hell on earth," and again, I doubt that I was quite so eloquent in my remonstrations.

"It's hyperbole," my former colleague contended.

"Hyperbole? Tell that to the poor schmoes who survived the firebombing of Dresden or the A-bomb at Hiroshima," and again, I'm embellishing my own eloquence here, I'm not even sure I'd heard of the firebombing of Dresden at that point in my life. But the essence of my point was something similar. "Tell them World War 3 is hyperbole."

When two journalists argue, no minds ever get changed, and the winner is almost always the one with the higher standing in the establishment's pecking order. So I'm sure whoever it was I argued with those 25 or so years before has gone on to write a dozen "World War 3" headlines that received nary a second glance from the slot.

I'm not even a hundred percent sure I'm right. I just know I'd never use the term "World War 3" to describe a sporting event, not even Ali-Frazier, Rocky Balboa and that Russian guy with the short blond hair, Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal, Britney Spears-Kevin Federline ... well, maybe that last one ... and if anybody challenged me on it, I'd say "Didn't you ever hear of hyperbole?"

Kinder, Gentler Fingernail Puller Outers

I admit it. I don't read the New York Times very often, so what I'm about to lambaste may be an aberration but the fact is I never liked their headlines. They remind me of the character in "Good Morning, Vietnam" who kept telling Robin Williams, "Now, this is funny."

I had little choice but to read the Times today while I waited for the auto repair shop to complete $792 worth of work on my car, which took from 7:30 a.m. until 2:15 p.m. I wasn't going to spend $1 for the Daily News at Starbucks, heck, I wasn't even going to spend three bucks for a latte, although I did eventually do that after spending about two hours ingesting four croissants at Bon Appetit in Mahwah, N.J. It was there that the woman at the next table abandoned her Times, and I stealthily slipped over and spirited it away before another patron grabbed it.

It was one of the front page headlines that made me wonder if some of their copy editors bother to read beyond the first paragraph of an article before firing off the head. Actually, I'm guessing some overpaid idiot patted him or herself on the back for this one. It was a single-column, three line head that said: "Taliban Using/ Lighter Touch/ To Win Allies." Oh, how clever.

Now, to that first paragraph, dateline Kabul: "The Taliban have embarked on a sophisticated information war, using modern media tools as well as some old-fashioned ones, to soften their image and win favor with local Afghans. ..."

They're softening their image, all right. Cut to the second paragraph, which outlines the new rules laid down by Mullah Omar: "The dictates include bans on suicide bombings against civilians, burning down schools, or cutting off ears, lips and tongues."

Of course the author qualifies this in paragraph 3: The code ... has been spottily enforced."

Spottily my eye, as my dear ol' mum used to say.

Give me my ear back, you Taliban cur. Haven't you heard about Mullah Omar's new dictates? What? I can't hear you.

The Civil War in Tweets

Just thought of a great idea for a book: The Civil War in Tweets. Fer example:

Bull Run no picnic, was like Roll Over, Pamplona

Little Round Top, like WOW, didn't know my uncle was in the Civil War

Appomattox, didn't his great-grandson pitch for the Braves?

Stonewall Jackson, bet he taught his cavalry horses to moonwalk

Spotsylvania, I dunno, looks like a GE lightbulb to me

General Lee bombed at Gettysburg but rocked in Dukes, right Daisy Mae?

Your suggestions and contributions are welcome!

Early to bed ...

It is with some sadness that I write this post, because I take no joy in knocking my former colleagues on the copy desk. The news editors, assignment editors, supervisory personnel, the managing editor and editor, they're all fair game, but I'd like to see the copy editors turning out sparkling headlines even at the cost of proving my job was superfluous.

I don't see the print version of my former employer, the Bergen Record, very often. I don't take advantage of the employee subscription discount to which I'm entitled, and when I have breakfast at the Plaza 46 diner my favorite waitress, Ella, usually plunks the New York Daily News or the New York Post in front of me at the counter to read with my eggs over easy, dry whole wheat toast and coffee, hold the potatoes, thanks. Not that I don't like the potatoes, but it helps me pretend I'm trying to watch my weight.

Speaking of which, weight, that is, today she plunked the first two sections of the Record in front of me, because the worst snowstorm in several decades had interrupted delivery of the Post and Daily News, and I was amazed -- you could almost say flabbergasted -- at how lacking in content the paper was. The Post, the News, I can sit there for half an hour reading meaty story after meaty story, stories buried on Page 8 that on a slow news day would be all over Page 1 but there are no slow news days in New York anymore. Today's Record was like Where's the Beef?

It's a funny phenomenon. You look at the Bergen Record from a few feet away, there it is, lying on the counter at the diner, it looks like a newspaper, like a damn good newspaper, a big, splashy picture on Page 1, big headline type, catchy-looking things we used to call ears and refers (pronounced reefers) promising goodies on the inside, informative-looking briefs running down the left hand side of the page.

Speaking of snowstorms, the Daily News used to run the comic strip "Annie," later the basis of a Broadway musical, and I won a monetary prize once, somewhere between $5 and $15, for a headline I wrote when the city was blanketed with upward of a foot of snow. "Bleepin' blizzards" was the headline. I was always kind of proud of that one. But I digress.

The first thing I noticed about today's Record was how vacuous its lead story was. I forget the headline, but the point of the story was that New Jersey is getting almost as much federal stimulus money for highway projects as New York and Pennsylvania (eight hundred and some million for New Jersey and a little over a billion each for New York and Pennsylvania), yet the number of jobs created in New Jersey is strikingly less. So the writer quoted this official and that official as saying that this is only the beginning, and that more jobs will be created down the road, no pun intended. But NOT ONCE did the writer even hint at the possibility that greedy contractors in New Jersey might be pocketing a much bigger chunk of the stimulus money than their counterparts in New York or Pennsylvania, or otherwise try to explain the discrepancy except to say more workers would be added in the future. Not one worker was interviewed, no salary figures were given. And to me the 800 pound gorilla in the article was the possibility that organized crime, not an unfamiliar entity in the state of New Jersey, has its scoop in the pie.

That was the first thing I noticed. But lest my critique run longer than the article itself, I'll move on to the preprint. The preprint is a holiday tradition at the Record, and I don't just mean at Christmastime. Every major holiday, when advertisements swell the paper in size, a part of the news section is printed on Friday night while the rest of the paper is printed Saturday.

The wire editor, as he goes through the day's stories, selects so-called "timeless" features, or long stories that won't fit in the regular news hole and can hold for a day or two without losing their value, and places them in a separate file. These stories are called "evergreen." Then when a holiday rolls around, the wire editor is given a preprint section to fill. It goes in the back of the main news section, and usually contains six to ten pages of what are called "shelfs and rails." A shelf is a story that goes above an ad that fills the width of the page but leaves about a three-inch-deep hole for news at the top. And a rail is an ad that comes to the top of the page but leaves a single column for news running down the side.

A good news editor, with a batch of evergreen in the queue, can lay out a six-page preprint in about two minutes.

I used to like editing preprint stories partially because they were usually from a wire service and were better edited than the staff copy, but mainly because the headlines on the shelves were usually six columns and no larger than 36 point, which gave a copy editor leeway to tap into his or her creativity.

Today's paper, this being the Sunday before Christmas, had a preprint. I daresay, when I opened it, I was terribly disappointed. I knew all the stories already because I'm an Internet news junkie, but that's not what disappointed me.

What bothered me is that the headlines were padded.

Now a little padding can be very attractive in certain parts of the body, if enough clothing is worn to disguise the padding, but there's no excuse, to me, for padding a headline with extraneous and unnecessary words. Well, there is an occasional excuse, if an extra word is needed to keep a line from breaking badly in a two- or a three-deck headline, you may have to choose between the lesser of two evils. But padding a six-column 36 point headline, there's no excuse.

These are the two headlines that bothered me the most.

1) Uproar in N.C. over atheist taking oath of office." What's padded about that, you might ask. "Taking oath of office?" At the very least, the copy editor could have written "Uproar in N.C. over swearing in of atheist," and the N.C. isn't even necessary. The key words here are legislator (which isn't in the headline), atheist, and oath of office. There are a hundred poignant headlines you could write with that kind of space.

2) "Judiciary acknowledges prisoners were beaten to death" -- this I knew to be a reference to Iran, although you'd think the copy editor would have mentioned Iran in the headline (there was a little "world" overline called a "bug" over the headline). Judiciary acknowledges. If that isn't padding, I don't know what is. I'm not saying he was right, because it was one of those rules that are made to be broken, but I once had a copy chief who banned headline words of more than two syllables because he wanted headlines to be easy to read. There is a place in headlines for polysyllabic words and I've used them myself on occasion, but "Judiciary acknowledges"?

During my last few years at the Record, the copy chief, V.B., used to send me headlines that other copy editors had written and ask me to massage them. And I've been out of the newspaper business for a year and a half. But I've got an idea. I just might try revising my resume, and instead of listing my job title as "copy editor," I'll list it as "masseur." Maybe I'll get lucky and my resume will wind up in the hands of an editor with a stiff neck.

Supermodel wife to Tiger: Fore(head)!

Every so often a story comes along that makes me wish I were working, just so I could write a headline that would get me fired all over again. (Editor's note: Actually, I was "restructured," as opposed to being fired but over the years I'd ruffled enough feathers of the loony birds in charge of the Bergen Record that I might as well have been fired).

Nevertheless, the headline above, tongue in cheek as it is, although in the case of Tiger Woods it might have been cheek in tongue, is an example of what you might call my signature headline. That is, taking one word, adding a prefix or a suffix, and giving it an altogether different meaning, or, in the converse, using a part of a word that fits into the headline yet keeping the rest of the word.

That sounds pretty complicated even to me, so here's an example. My goddaughter, who's in medical school, went to California this week, where she had Thanksgiving dinner with her brother and her little nephew, who I would guess is sixish. My goddaughter noted on her facebook page that said nephew felt badly for all the turkeys but gobbled up his dinner nonetheless. Then she noted that his prefrontal cortex won't be fully formed for a few more years, so what can you expect? I commented that she could send him a cortex message.

Without further deconstruction, that was one of the primary tools of my headline writing craft over the years. I'm sure I wrote hundreds of headline using that particular type of pun, but while I used to think I should keep examples I never did, so this will have to do.

Of course any competent editor would flat out reject my Tiger Woods headline with the remark that it hasn't been proved that his wife whacked him in the face with a golf club. He might have just been leaving the house at 2:15 a.m. to go wait in line at Walmart so he could buy a $299 42-inch HDTV for the den. Or said editor might say "Tiger might have been seriously hurt. You can't make fun of such a situation."

In either case, the editor would be right. But this is my blog and I'm sticking to it.

Recycled Ridiculousness

#!):?(ing Labels

Rumor has it that my former employer, the Herald Record of Woodland Park, N.J., has banned colon headlines. Read that, "Editor to copy desk: No more colons," only, as was always the case at my former place of employ, the editor himself or herself was always too much of a wuss to throw down such an edict him-or-herself, so, according to rumor, the order was barked in the form of a memo from an intermediary, something to the effect of "Let's not write headlines with colons in them anymore."

As I've mentioned previously, at one time or another I've seen just about everything you can put in a headline banned except spoons. And personally, I'd like to ban spoons. The kind used by headline writers who write things like "Performance stirs emotions," or "Election result stirs anger." Such headline spooning should be restricted to the food section. "Chef stirs pot," now there's a headline that makes sense.

During a recent discussion of the alack and alas rumored to be doomed colons, I pondered an accomplishment which at the time I deemed to be virtually impossible. If I were still chained to a copy desk, I opined, I'd love someday to write a single headline that included not only a colon but an exclamation point, a question mark, a parenthesis or two, and, of course, it couldn't be a normal straight headline but would have to be a gerund.

Then it dawned on me. Only I daresay in the above headline I cheated a bit by using a faux gerund, as it were. And it isn't a cliche, unless you consider a string of punctuation marks in place of an expletive to be a cliche.

I can see debating whether a colon should be used to place the attribution at the beginning or the end of a headline, as in "Report: Newspaper business at death's doorstep" vs. "Newspaper business at death's doorstep: Report."

But banning colons entirely? If the New York Daily News had banned colon headlines many years ago, the great headline writer Joe Percival might never have been able to write, on a story about a woman who advertised her colon-cleansing services in the back of New York magazine being arrested when one of her clients turned up dead, a headline that read: "Public enema Number 1." On the other hand, I guess he still could have written that, unless some editor banned colons from stories as well.