A [Huffington Post] story . . . headlined: “Obama Rejects Rush Limbaugh Golf Match: Rush ‘Can Play With Himself.’ ” It’s digital nirvana: two highly searched proper nouns followed by a smutty entendre, a headline that both the red and the blue may be compelled to click, and the readers of the site can have a laugh while the headline delivers great visibility out on the web.
—DAVID CARR, NEW YORK TIMES
FOR MEDIA THAT LIVES AND DIES BY CLICKS (THE One-Off Problem) it all comes down to the headline. It’s what catches the attention of the public—yelled by a newsboy or seen on a search engine. In a one-off world there is nothing more important than the pitch to prospective buyers. And they need many exciting new pitches every day, each louder and more compelling than the last. Even if reality is not so interesting.
That’s where I come in. I make up the news; blogs make up the headline.
Although it seems easy, headline writing is an incredibly difficult task. The editor has to reduce an entire story down to just a few units of text—turning a few hundred-or thousand-word piece into just a few words, period. In the process it must express the article’s central ideas in an exciting way.
According to Gabriel Snyder, the former managing editor of Gawker Media and later an editor at the traffic powerhouse TheAtlantic.com, blog headlines are “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.” Readers and revenue depend on the headline’s ability to win this fight.
In the days of the yellow press the front pages of the World and the Journal went head to head every day, driving each other to greater and greater extremes. As a publisher, William Randolph Hearst obsessed over his headlines, tweaking their wording, writing and rewriting them, riding his editors until they were perfect. Each one, he thought, could steal another one hundred readers away from another paper.1
It worked. As a young man Upton Sinclair remembered hearing the newsboys shouting “Extra!” and seeing the headline war DECLARED! splashed across the front page of Hearst’s New York Evening Journal. He parted with his hard-earned pennies and read eagerly, only to find rather a big difference between what he’d thought and what he’d bought. It was actually “War (may be) Declared (soon).”2
They won, he lost. That same hustle happens online every day. Each blog is competing not just to be the leader on a particular story but against all the other topics a reader could potentially commit to reading about (and also against checking e-mail, chatting with friends, and watching videos, or even pornography). So here we are on our fancy MacBooks and wireless internet, stuck again with the same bogus headlines we had in the nineteenth century.
From today:*
Naked Lady Gaga Talks Drugs and Celibacy
Hugh Hefner: I Am Not a Sex Slave Rapist in a Palace of Poop
The Top Nine Videos of Babies Farting and/or Laughing with Kittens
How Justin Bieber Caught a Contagious Syphilis Rumor
WATCH: Heartbroken Diddy Offers to Expose Himself to Chelsea Handler
Little Girl Slaps Mom with Piece of Pizza, Saves Life
Penguin Shits on Senate Floor
Now compare those to some of these classic headlines from 1898 to 1903:
WAR WILL BE DECLARED IN FIFTEEN MINUTES
AN ORGY OF GRAY-HAIRED MEN, CALLOW YOUTHS, GAMBLERS, ROUGHS, AND PAINTED WOMEN—GENERAL DRUNKENNESS—FIGHTS AT INTERVALS—IT WAS VICE’S CARNIVAL
COULDN’T SELL HIS EAR, OLD MAN SHOOTS HIMSELF
OWL FRIGHTENS WOMAN TO DEATH IN HOSPITAL
BULLDOG TRIES TO KILL YOUNG GIRL HE HATES
CAT GAVE TENANTS NIGHTLY “CREEPS”*
As magician Ricky Jay once put it, “People respond to and are deceived by the same things they were a hundred years ago.” Only today the headlines are being yelled not on busy street corners but on noisy news aggregators and social networks.
Just like in the past, many online headlines exploit the so-called curiosity gap. If you don’t know what that is, this headline from FastCom pany.com satirizes it perfectly: “Upworthy’s Headlines Are Insufferable. Here’s Why You Click Anyway.” I’ve even done this with many of my own popular articles: “Here’s the Strategy Elite Athletes Follow to Perform at the Highest Level” (over 500,000 total views) or “The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feelings” (over one million views). You have to click to figure out what it means (and you can’t unclick once you have!).
In a subscription model the headline of any one article competes only with the other articles included in the publication. The articles on the front page compete with those on the inside pages, and perhaps with the notion of putting down the paper entirely, but they do not, for the most part, compete head to head with the front pages of other newspapers. The subscription takes care of that—you already made your choice. As a result, the job of the headline writer for media consumed by subscription is relatively easy. The reader has already paid for the publication, so they’ll probably read the content in front of them.
The predicament of an online publisher today is that it has no such buffer. Its creative solution, as it was one hundred years ago, is exaggeration and lies and bogus tags like exclusive, extra, unprecedented,* and photos in the requisite capital letters. They overstate their stories, latching on to the most compelling angles and parading themselves in front of the public like a prostitute. They are more than willing for PR people and marketers to be their partners in crime.
In 1971, the New York Times, a subscription paper, had a big story on their hands. A disillusioned government analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of documents, now known as the Pentagon Papers, proving that the United States had systematically deceived the public and the world to go to war with Vietnam.
Could a one-off paper have gotten away with this headline?: vietnam archive: a consensus to bomb developed before ’64 election, study says.
Because that’s what the New York Times ran, still successfully reaching everyone in the country with the big news. They could afford to be reasoned, calm, and circumspect while still aggressively pursuing the story, despite the shameful efforts of the U.S. government to block its publication. The truth and significance of the Pentagon Papers were enough.
Compare this to a headline I conned Jezebel into writing for a nonevent: exclusive: american apparel’s rejected halloween costume ideas (american appalling).3 It did nearly 100,000 pageviews. Not only was the headline overstated, but as I said before, the leak was fake. I just had one of my employees send over some extra photos that couldn’t be used for legal reasons.
Again, as a writer who sees my own articles dressed up with fancy headlines online, I’m often amused by the absurdity. Take a piece with exclusive interview as the tag. Does that mean that I am the only person to ever interview that person, or that this site is the only place that has my interview with that person? There’s really no way to know . . . unless you click.
Outside of the subscription model, headlines are intended not to represent the contents of articles but to sell them—to win the fight for attention against an infinite number of other blogs or papers. They must so captivate the customer that they click or plunk down the money to buy them. Each headline competes with every other headline. On a blog, every page is the front page. It’s no wonder that the headlines of the yellow press and the headlines of blogs run to such extremes. It is a desperate fight. Life or death.
And what are the consequences? You’re not a subscriber. You can’t take your click back. They’ve already sold it on a real-time advertising exchange. They’ve already been paid for it. (And remember, if you share the article in exasperation or even sheer disgust to a friend to show them how bad it is, you’re actually helping the outlet!)
The columnist and media critic Walter Lippmann once observed, “The reader expects the fountains of truth to bubble, but he enters into no contract, legal or moral, involving any risk or cost or trouble to himself. He will pay a nominal price when it suits him, will stop paying whenever it suits him, will turn to another paper when that suits him.” And he said that when a lot more people still did pay for newspapers (and they cost literally three cents). He concluded by saying that the “newspaper editor has to be re-elected every day.” That’s a lot of pressure on the shoulders of an editor or writer, but imagine the pressure today, when every single article published—hundreds of them a day across a single publication—is fighting for reelection. It’s going to get very noisy and there’s going to be a lot of mudslinging and lying. It’s the dirtiest politics there is.
For the most part, newspapers from the stable period not only had plainly stated headlines, but also had a tradition of witty headlines. Readers had time to get subtle jokes. There could be puns and allusions. There could be intelligent references. They could be understated. Things are a little different now. As they say, Google doesn’t laugh (or think). Google sends literally billions of clicks a month to publishers through Google News and another three billion clicks through its search and other services.4
Follow a story through Google News and you’ll see. The service begins by displaying twenty or so main news stories from which a reader may choose. I may read one article, or I may read five, but I likely will not read all, so each one vies for my attention—screaming, in not so many words, “Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!” Google News displays the story from a handful of outlets under each of those bold headlines. If the main headline is from CNN, the smaller headlines underneath may be from Fox News or the Washington Post or Wikipedia or TalkingPointsMemo. Each outlet’s headline screams, “Pick me! Pick me!” and Google alludes to the rest of the iceberg lurking beneath under these chosen few: “All 522 news articles.” How does one stand out against five hundred other articles? Its scream of “No, pick me! Pick me!” must be the loudest and most extreme.
For millennials, Facebook is the single biggest news source—they’re not going to CNN.com or turning on the evening news to be informed; they are using Facebook as a filter, as a discovery tool for that news. A 2016 Pew Report found that 62 percent of adults get some of their news from Facebook and 18 percent get it regularly from Facebook. As with Google News, it’s Facebook’s algorithm that creates the competition between headlines, but in this case news is trying to be heard not just over other news but also over memes, family photos, and personal news. So it’s “PICK ME! PICK ME! IGNORE YOUR SISTER’S NEW BABY! PICK ME!”
Andrew Malcolm, creator of the Los Angeles Times’s massive Top of the Ticket political blog (which did 33 million readers in two years), specifically asks himself before writing a headline, “How can we make our item stick out from all the other ones?” And from this bold approach to editorial ethics comes proud election-cycle headlines such as “Hillary Clinton Shot a Duck Once” and “McCain Comes Out Against Deadly Nuclear Weapons, Obama Does Too.” I’m not cherry-picking: That’s what he chose to brag about in a book of advice to aspiring bloggers.
“We do ironic headlines, smart headlines, and work hard to make very serious stories as interesting as we can,” Arianna Huffington told the New York Times.5 “We pride ourselves on bringing in our community on which headlines work best.”
They also do their headlines in a massive thirty-two-point font. By “best” Huffington does not mean the one that represents the story better. The question is not “Was this headline accurate?” but “Was it clicked more than the others?” The headlines must work for the publisher, not the reader. Yahoo!’s homepage, for example, tests more than 45,000 unique combinations of story headlines and photos every five minutes.6 They too pride themselves on how they display the best four main stories they can, but I don’t think their complicated, four-years-in-the-making algorithm shares any human’s definition of that word.
It should be clear what types of headlines blogs are interested in. It’s not pretty, but if that’s what they want, give it to them. You don’t really have a choice. They aren’t going to write about you, your clients, or your story unless it can be turned into a headline that will drive traffic.
You figured out the best way to do this when you were twelve years old and wanted something from your parents: Come up with the idea and let them think they were the ones who came up with it. Basically, write the headline—or hint at the options—in your e-mail or press release or whatever you give to the blogger and let them steal it. That’s what publicists are thinking when they pitch: Is there a great headline here? Because if the story is “Person You’ve Never Heard Of Does Something Not That Interesting,” no site is going to bite. Instead, the click-friendly, share-provoking headline has to be so obvious and enticing that there is no way they can pass it up. Hell, make them tone it down. They’ll be so happy to have the headline that they won’t bother to check whether it’s true or not.
Their job is to think about the headline above all else. The medium and their bosses force them to. So that’s where you make the sale. Only the reader gets stuck with the buyer’s remorse.
*My favorite: The Washington Post accidentally published this headline to an article about weather preparedness: “SEO Headline Here” (“SEO” stands for “search engine optimization”).
*For some more fun headlines, the walls of Keens Steakhouse in New York City are covered with amazing front-page headlines from its glory days in the late nineteenth century.
*This one is my favorite, because the thing always happens to be not only not unprecedented but hilariously pedestrian.