Ombudswoman #3

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

Last week, Barnard President Judith Shapiro announced that she is going to resign, which was pretty big news (we ran two articles on it: here and here). The headline, though, was bigger than the news. Bwog linked to the articles in QuickSpec with the tag: “PREZSHAP TO RESIGN OMG!!! (now, what font size do they use for assassinations or declarations of war?).” And, well, they make a point. While Spectator probably won’t be announcing assassinations or declarations of war any time soon, there is a sense that a headline that big leaves little room for bigger news. And we could have bigger news than the president of Barnard resigning.

How big would the headline be if PrezBo resigned? Or if a top administrator were arrested for tax fraud? Or if Columbia got a donation so large it could beat Harvard’s endowment? Or if Low blew up? I know that none of those things are particularly likely (though they would all make for a good time so far as journalism is concerned and some of them are not completely insane), but if those things happened, our headline really couldn’t get that much larger.

Why does this matter so much? Because as depressing as it may be, more people read the headlines than read the articles in newspapers and because the placement and size of headlines tells readers how important an event or story is. Above the fold or below the fold? Size? Bold? Centered? All these decisions mean something. And if a headline is huge, well, then the news better be that important.

I do think Shapiro’s resignation is a big deal. But so was David Charlow’s suspension, so was the next day’s $400 million donation to Columbia, so was the stage being rushed during the Minuteman Project’s speech last semester. And none of those got headlines nearly as big as Shapiro’s resignation. Nor did SEAS Dean Zvi Galil’s announcement last semester that he was leaving Columbia for Tel Aviv University. And while that announcement was less huge in important ways, that article got a normal one-column lede-article headline that doesn’t compare at all to the size of the Shapiro headline.

Each day’s Spectator is not an isolated group of articles; it is a part of a cohesive whole that is what Spec puts out each day. And that means, the news is all in relation to the news we published before the news we will publish afterward, and that means all that should be taken into account when the headline size is decided.

The headline also looked even bigger because it was all-caps. Spec’s style this semester (and off-and-on in the recent past) has been to run an all-caps headline for the lead article every day. And I am definitely not one who likes to mess with established Spec style, but I would argue that it might be worth considering not running the lead headline all-caps if it is the only article that runs above the fold. (I would also argue that even on regular lead articles that style sometimes makes the news seem bigger than it is.)

A good headline should tell the reader how important an article is and also what is in the article. One of my gripes with The Eye, is that often the headlines on the cover of The Eye do not do a good job telling what the cover article is about, and the cover art (though generally beautiful) only sometimes helps. And without that information, readers are unlikely to open the magazine. (“Generation Why” could be a headline for an article about any number of things.) One good option there might be to run subheadlines off the cover that give a little bit more information about what you’ll get if you open it.

Sports sometimes has a similar problem in that you can’t always tell what sport an article is about. Without a picture or a headline or an indication in the lede, an interested but not overly knowledgeable reader will be lost. I’ve been impressed that sports has been getting better about this. I know the idea of running tags on all sports articles to identify the sport has been bandied back and forth, but barring that, readers must know by the time they get to the lede what sport the article is about. The sports articles have been Web-saved recently with tags identifying the sports, which is definitely a good step, especially because on the Web site you can’t see the pictures the articles are attached to in the print edition to identify the sport.

There is no rubric to tell us exactly how important a piece of news is and how important the headline should be, nor is there a fortune-teller to let us know how a specific piece of news compares to the coming events. But part of a newspaper’s job is to figure all that out and then make decisions that best represent the news and most encourage readers to, well, read.