Is it a blurb? A cutline?

And what's that byline doing there if this is a blurb? Check out the first sentence that isn't a sentence; it's a label. Was this a mistake or a new online form?

Power of a hed

This week, an ad in The New York Times caused quite a stir.
Here's the MoveOn web site where there are links to documents backing the group's argument as well as a pdf version of the full ad. Poynter's Roy Peter Clark writes off of the controversy, taking it as a way into discussion of why your "darling" headlines maybe ought not to run. Here's a take-out from his article:

I think what we have here is more than a failure to communicate. It's a seduction by creativity, an insincerity mated to hyperbole to meet the demands of a snarky and polarized political culture. The headline writer should have followed the advice, almost a century old now, of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who lectured his Cambridge students that "style ... can never be ... extraneous ornament ... Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it -- whole-heartedly -- and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

Headlines are tricky

When I first read this headline from the Arizona Republic, I misunderstood it completely. My original understanding of the headline was that a man was suspected of firing a gun at an officer who was in custody. Then I thought, "There's no way I read that correctly." I had to read it again in order to realize that what the reporter meant was that the man who was suspected of firing a gun at the officer was put into custody. Thus, as this headline shows, word order in a headline can change its intended meaning and confuse (some) readers.

Ambiguity and an echo

I don't know what the new search-engine-optimization gurus have to say about echos ("search resumes" in the hed, "searchers resumed" in the lede), but there's no doubt that the main hed can be read as a command to look at resumes ("search" as verb, "resumes" as noun). It only takes a second or so to make the mental adjustment and get the correct meaning, but that second is precious time and the conflict has made the reader WRONG! Not anything you want to do. "Searches resume" would be better if you were correcting on the fly.