The nuance of headlines

The headline this morning on the story of our dean, Charles Bierbauer, who announced yesterday he's leaving that job at the end of the academic year in June, got me thinking about the nuance of headlines.

Headline writing is tough. Don't believe me? Just try summarizing that nuclear disarmament story in a nine-count, three-line, one-column hed in print. (That would be a total of roughly 27 characters for those of the Twitter age, and probably one or two fewer because with print fonts, capital letters are wider and count as 1 1/2 or two, m's and w's are wider, some lowercase letters only count as one-half, etc.)

It's not a lot better online. Sure, you don't have to worry about those pesky line breaks, but even online heds have their limits -- abut 65 characters if you want to make sure it displays properly in those search engine results or on a mobile screen. Again, still less than your normal tweet.

There are a lot of ways things can go wrong.

This discussion isn't about the laughingly off tone, like "DOJ launching Fannie probe" (referring to an investigation of the Federal National Mortgage Association, more commonly known as Fannie Mae).

Nor is it about "Their ship has come in" -- a glaringly tone-deaf headline atop a story about a memorial for the hundreds of sailors who died when the USS Indianapolis sank. (Their ship is never coming in.) Or the awful "xx Mississippians gone with the wind" (I forget the exact number) on a story about hurricane deaths.

This is about those tiny but important nuances that journalists must face every day. They are ever present in reporting and writing. They become more glaringly so when translated to a headline.

So today there is this headline on a story on The State newspaper's website:

OK. It's serviceable. Nothing really wrong. But as we've learned time and time again this political season, there is right -- and then there is more right. With headlines, it often comes down to verb tense and word connotation and order.

Tense
In headline writing, there are some rules, or at least guides, when it comes to verb tense. The present participle (stepping) indicates current ongoing action or sometimes action to be completed in the near future. The present tense is used as "historical present" to represent action recently completed. The future speaks for itself. The past tense is rarely used; it is supposed to signify new information about something in the past not previously known (say, for instance, you just got a 5-year-old report showing that the Justice Department investigated Fannie Mae but no one knew till now. Then you might write DOJ probed Fannie ... OK, maybe not. But you get the idea.)

So using "steps" in this headline really means the dean has done the deed already. Yes, he's announced it, so one could argue he sort of kind of stepped down. But he's not really leaving till June, and this is August, so the nuance is wrong. "To step" (or will) is the better choice. That is the tense used in the university news release (though it is interesting to see the URL uses "stepping").

Usage
All words have denotation and connotation. So the denotation of "step down" is fine -- it is what he is doing in the broad sense. But the connotation gets us to nuance again. When we hear an official has stepped down, the mind wonders a bit why? Did something wrong? Retiring? Health?

In other words, while the phrase is technically correct (denotation), it is broader than needed and leaves itself open to questions and multiple interpretations, not all of them flattering (connotation). In headline writing, whenever the count allows you to be more specific, it's almost always better because it gets connotation out of the equation. And our job, after all is to try to perfect communication -- make sure the message sent is most likely the message received.

So what is Bierbauer really doing? Well, after almost 15 years and at age 74, he's actually retiring. So that would be the better word.

Longtime USC communications dean to retire

Word order
Some have noted that Bierbauer said in his letter that "this is not retirement." Granted, but we are journalists, not stenographers, and so we have to apply some reasoning. But this also highlights the nuances.

Most journalists I know never really admit to retiring. They can always scribble, after all. And "emeritus" status at a university is like being a retired federal judge or commissioned military officer -- you can always be called out of retirement. (Style warning: Never call someone a "former" general, etc., unless he or she has renounced the commission or somehow been dishonorably discharged.)

This is what Bierbauer wrote: For now, this is not retirement, but transition. I plan to work on the Watson-Brown journalism history project, hope to do some writing on media and politics and determine ways I might continue to be useful to the college and university.

So he is retiring as dean. Which gets us to word order. Since we're dealing with an online hed, we can more easily switch things around:

Bierbauer to retire as longtime USC communications dean

That maintains the sense that he's retiring as dean. (If space is an issue, take out "longtime.")

While this may seem nit picking -- after all, the original hed was serviceable -- this gets to journalistic craft. There used to be time -- admittedly not much, but still a little -- to reflect on these things in the course of putting out the "daily miracle." We need to figure out how to preserve that in this hamster-wheel world journalists now exist in.

On an end note, it's been a pleasure working with Dean Bierbauer, who came on board at USC a year after I did. He's been a steady hand at the tiller and always a proponent of good journalism and good journalism teaching. He understood that delicate balance we walk between the academic and professional missions of the school. I wish him the best.

Headlines and prepositions

My friend and very talented designer, Ed Henniger, has a rant up complaining about seeing headlines ending their first lines with prepositions and articles.

This is one of those things that, while once considered a sign of good craft, has become largely a non-issue on most publications.

My note back to Ed:

Sorry, Ed, but it's long ago been declared a nonissue on most desks and at ACES. And readers' panels at ACES through which we tested headlines made clear it was not an issue to them. As one woman pointedly said when questioned rather severely from an audience member: "You really lose sleep over that?"

I remind folks of it as craft the first couple of times, but I don't push it anymore.

Time to declare it a shibboleth and move on.

It's especially true in an era when headlines often have to do double duty in print and online -- where how it is displayed is a function of many things, including window size.

 I know this will be a hard one to swallow in some quarters, but there are far more important things to worry about these days. Nothing we have indicates any reduction in comprehension.

Refute/Rebut -- we should get it right

How difficult is it to remember the correct usage for refute versus rebut?

Very difficult, apparently, for The State newspaper, which consistently makes the wrong choice.

Rebut means simply to present a counterargument. Refute carries a much greater weight, the connotation that someone has proved the point.

Nothing could be further from the truth in this story, where the referee's story is being disputed even by the NFL's VP of officials. So the referee "rebuts" but hardly "refutes."

At times of trauma, pay special attention to layout

The State in Columbia, S.C., did yeoman's work in covering last week's murder-suicide at the University of South Carolina.

But the front page the next day points out why in times of trauma, everyone has to be on high alert for issues in every part of the paper and website.

Might have wanted to rethink that lower hed:

Headlines: Where you put the atttibution can be important

It's worth some attention to where you put the attribution in a headline.

There's this gem from Reuters, courtesy of James Montalbano over at Testy Copy Editors.

It's almost always 'rebut,' not 'refute'

The State newspaper in Columbia has suddenly, in recent months, seemed to get tangled up about "rebut" versus "refute." Maybe they don't go over this at the editing hub up north or whatever.

Tonight's entry:

Unless you're taking the PGA's side in this, the word is "rebuts" -- or, even better, "denies," which is the word used in the story's lede.

"Refutes" implies that you've taken sides and decided that one party has essentially proved its argument.

It's not an inconsequential nuance, especially in headline type, for professional writers and editors who are supposed to know better.

Crash Blossom: Why would it melt a car to get a sunshade?

On an AP story today in my local paper:

UK tower accused of melting car to get sunshade

One might wonder whether the accused tower will get community service or a stronger sentence for melting that car to get its sunshade. Seems it would have been easier just to go down to the local Tesco to buy one, eh?

The actual story, of course, is that the reflective glare from the concave face of the glass office building in London is so strong it is blistering paint, and one Jaguar owner said it melted part of his car. So the owners are going to put horizontal aluminum fins on the building to absorb and diffuse the light.

That old "affect," "effect" problem again

The folks at Governing mag are pretty smart, but apparently not so much today when it comes to the headline in the morning email about school superintendents and elections.

That should be "affect":

(On the website, the hed now is School superintendents and the messy business of politics)

Burying the lede on the Connor Shaw story

Here's today's victory lap from The State after yesterday's South Carolina victory over Clemson:

So if you are going to headline that the coach calls Connor Shaw the best quarterback in school history, shouldn't that be somewhere near the top, not several hundred words down in the third leg - past even a graf on a trick pass play?

Just sayin'. (I can't link to the story because this version isn't online. Click on the picture to see the larger version.)

(This kind of stuff appears all the time in Testy Copy Editors. It's a shame that journalists seem to think that all kinds of meanderings at the top of a story are high art when we are in a mobile age when people tend to want the info fast and to the point - and when tight editing is becoming less and less common.)

Headline Oops: Home, home on the range - without a dictionary

Yeah, what can you say  about heds like this?

Update 11/24: As might be expected, when this showed up on my Facebook feed, some folks started getting upset about the state of the media business. I agree. I empathize. But I also wrote this:

Let's be honest. Risk assessment as part of the cost-benefit analysis has always been part of business, and a media company is a business. Please don't read this as an endorsement, but please understand if I don't get all weepy about this kind of stuff. 

The managers of these businesses have made an obvious assessment that they can diminish product quality and still make a dime or two - maybe more than before (though most of this is a stem, not stop, the bleeding strategy). Most newspapers and broadcasters have never been in the Audi or BMW line of business - they've been a higher-end Ford or Chevy at best (maybe occasionally a Buick). 

It's business, folks; get used to it or start your own and prove that quality sells. 

These are not public utilities (whether they should be is another debate). As I used to tell ACES, if you want to make the quality argument, you've got to monetize it -- and the only ones who will do that for you are the libel insurers (or, perhaps eventually, the customers, but I'm not holding my breath on that). Until then, we get to make fun, but don't get all exercised about it beyond that.

Crash Blossom: It's nice to know the attacking bears are happy

From a Canadian site, Castanet, comes this crash blossom headline:

From the headline bin - huh?

What more can you say?

From The State, Columbia, S.C.

Online headlines: Sometimes you must think about the long tail

Online headlines live forever.

It's worth remembering that when you see a hed like this days and weeks after a person's death:

The news of the moment might be that this famous order caller at The Beacon restaurant will "lie in repose," though one might suggest the headline is pretty dull for such a well-known character (and is "in repose" really conversational)?

But two days from now, when people are still coming to your site for this news, or five, 10 or 30 days later, you can look silly with this head.

Do it if you must for the moment - but then update it later.

(There is a later story about Stroble's funeral, but the problem I see is that this earlier story is the "base" story - the big take-out on his life that is likely to be the main one people come back to down the road.)

Questions, questions everywhere - how many is too many question heds?

I'm not one of those who reflexively recoils at a question headline. They have their place (one of my favorites was from the Wall Street Journal: Are you ready for deflation?)

But generally, it's not the best policy to greet readers with a front page -- at least above the fold -- with the indication that there are nothing but questions in the paper today, as my local paper did yesterday.

The State has never met a question (or quote) hed it didn't love, but like spice, a little goes a long way:

Spelling: Use "I" before "E" in this hed

Yes, variation is the spice of life. But when you see "var" or "variant" in the dictionary (especially one considered as liberal as Merriam-Webster), it's usually a signal to professional editors to look for the more standard spelling.

In this case, inflames would have kept this hed from going down in flames ...

Headlines: And you thought your dog made a mess ...

From the Athens, Ga., paper's online site:

Bad layout - Football players, sexual predators

One wonders if those laying out The (Columbia, S.C.) State today folded the paper in half, stepped back and took a look at the layout.

Hint: Always try to look at the page as two half pages, because that's how many of your readers will see it.

(Thanks to Augie Grant for the photo, which I was about to take when his arrived in my email.)

Numeracy Illiteracy - the headline edition

I suppose I should be grateful that my local paper, The State, gives me such timely material for teaching.

But even though we were discussing numeracy in editing class, the paper didn't have to be this accommodating with this headline today:

Here's the first part of the story:

South Carolina’s $25 billion retirement fund earned a 4 percent return on its investments from July to September, the fund’s chief investment officer told the State Budget and Control Board on Tuesday.

But Hershel Harper said the fund will struggle to make its goal of a 7.5 percent annual return over the next five years. State officials say the fund needs to average that return to stay solvent .... The retirement fund made a 0.37 percent return on its investments last fiscal year, which ended June 30. After paying its expenses , including benefits to retirees and fees, the fund lost $1 billion in value. 

So , no, earnings weren't up 4 percent. The percentage here is not being used as a relative comparison but as an absolute - it's a rate of return.

Had the earnings been "up" 4 percent, that would be 0.37*1.04, or 0.385 percent.

Because the rate of return is an absolute number, the "up" or increase in it would actually be 13,233 percent! ((4/0.37)-1)*100

Think of a thermometer - with the rates of return sot of like the "degrees." If the temperature went from 20 to 50, you wouldn't say "temperature up" 50 degrees. You'd say "temperature reaches 50" or maybe that it rises 30 (or, if you were into headlinese, "temperature up 30".
 So this headline really should be:

Earnings reach 4 percent in quarter

or a little less elegantly

Earnings rise to 4 percent in quarter

This kind of innumeracy isn't good in any case, but in 36-point type it really disappoints.

(The online version avoided the problem.)

How a newspaper is a convicting a man before trial

The case of a missing Richland County teenager continues to make headlines here - and to tug at the heartstrings of those searching for Gabrielle Swainson. The local sheriff has called a man arrested in the case a "monster."

Sheriff Leon Lott, no slouch when it comes to media savvy, continues to spin the story like a twister coming out of the plains. And it's hard, from the details that have come out so far, to not feel a sense of dread about Swainson's fate and a desire to see justice done.

Which is even more reason for the local media to keep a cool head.

Apparently The State newspaper missed that basic idea of journalism back in school, because it seems hellbent on convicting the suspect before trial: specifically reporter Noelle Phillips - but even more important, the editors who are supposed to have the smarts to keep a level head in all this.

Let's start with this headline of Aug. 29:

The quote marks are unlikely to mitigate that the paper has just called him a "monster." In fact, during the years at American Copy Editors Society meetings, readers panels have told us they often don't see the quote marks as attributing it to someone else but as the paper being snarky.

That was followed by this lead:

A man described as a monster and a career criminal forced 15-year-old Gabrielle Swainson from her home in the wee hours of the night on Aug. 18 and took her to his burned-out house on a dirt lane in Elgin.

 What happened in that house is unknown, but there is clear evidence of foul play, Sheriff Leon Lott said Tuesday.

 Now, 52-year-old Freddie Grant, is in jail on kidnapping and federal gun charges, refusing to cooperate with the FBI and sheriff’s investigators, who were searching for Gabrielle.

 “A monster came in that morning and did something that only happens in our nightmares,” Lott said.

I have real problems with that opening paragraph being unattributed. It's Editing 101 - when you make serious accusations, don't leave them naked - the two-graf, attribution in the second graf lede doesn't work well. First, some of your readers won't make it to graf 2 (a major part, actually, called "scanners"), and some others will have that first graf stuck in their heads and not make the clear connection that Lott is saying both things.

(While we're at it, I have the same problem with the third graf. Is Lott also saying that or is the paper divining it?) 

Apparently, The State thought better of itself, because online it tacked an "authorities said Tuesday" onto the end.

Then, today, we've got this:

The mystery of how an accused kidnapper entered the home of missing teen Gabrielle Swainson has been solved after investigators found a key inside the suspect’s house, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said Wednesday.

Maybe the editors at The State missed it in Editing 102 when this came up (probably slept in), but they could always have referred to the AP stylebook:

To avoid any suggestion that an individual is being judged before a trial, do not use a phrase such as accused slayer John Jones; use John Jones, accused of the slaying.

Add to that the overall tone "mystery .... has been solved" and compound it by the subhead above it:

Any number of good texts on journalism and language (the editors might try Jack Cappon's put out by AP that was originally known as "The Word" -- hey, I know times are tough in newsrooms, but you can get a copy of it used for 1 cent plus $3.99 shipping; give  me a holler and I'll send you the $4) will tell you the connotation of words is as important as the denotation and that "claimed" has a pejorative, hands-on-hips, disbelief connotation.

Let's also add the definitive statement that he "entered" the house to the list.

But what's a little skill with the language among friends who are supposed to be professionals about it, eh?

Maybe something like this?:

A key to missing teen Gabrielle Swainson's house has been found in the home of the man charged with kidnapping in her disappearance, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said Wednesday.

Or

The man charged with kidnapping in teenager Gabrielle Swainson's disappearance had a key to her house, and it was found in Freddie Grant's house after Grant said it had been lost, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said Wednesday.

No wonder the suspect's lawyer has asked for a gag order. Too bad it can't also include a suggestion that Phillips, but especially the editors at The State, go back and think about some of the principles of fairness and balance that got most of us into this business in the first place.

Trust me, I think they'll sell just as many copies. Let the story tell itself instead of becoming a tool.

Update 09/07: Roy Greenslade of Britain's The Guardian also weighs in.

That old subject-verb problem, CNBC style

This hed was on CNBC today:

Oops. "Fidelity Investments" is just one firm. It takes "keeps" (unless we're being very British about things).

You can't even really argue here that this is akin to "the Elks ...are" argument put forth in some quarters (and that I generally don't worry about as an editor these days). The "root" here, if I can use the term, is "Fidelity." The best test is how the company is referred to on second reference. So Fidelity ... keeps.

(One other thought -- this is a good place where "that" would not be out of place between "Tuesday" and "Abigail," just to make clear her first name is not "Tuesday." But feel free to differ.)