Monday, April 28, 2008

headine writing for the Web

Just this past week at my copy editing internship at The Arizona Republic, we had to go through some video training for a new video software that azcentral.com has just started using. Among the gist of the training was the pounding-into-our-heads of the idea of "label" heads.
In case you aren't familiar with this jargon, a label head is one that doesn't necessarily require a verb; it is simply what it sounds like, a label. For example, "Tour through the city" or "Horseback riding lessons" are both label heads. They are pretty bland, but straight to the point, not giving much else detail but for the few key words that a user needs to know to associate with the story.
The reason for this is because when users search through azcentral.com, they may only type in those particular key words to find the video they are searching for, not necessarily some fancy verb that the copy editor wants to use.
That got me thinking... is this the new future of headlines? Since everything is gravitating toward the Web, is the art of the fancifully done headline soon becoming extinct? Headlines should just state the point of the story anyway, but the flowery, fancy, artsy ones for things like feature stories aren't going to cut it when the story goes up on a Web site.

Just some food for thought ...

No comments: