This Boring Headline is Written for Google

prostoalex writes "The New York Times is running an article on how newspapers around the country find their Web sites more dependent on search engines than before. The unexpected effect? Witty double entendres, allusions and sarcastic remarks are rewritten into boring straight-to-the-point headlines that rank higher on search engines and news-specific search engines. From the article: 'About a year ago, The Sacramento Bee changed online section titles. "Real Estate" became "Homes," "Scene" turned into "Lifestyle," and dining information found in newsprint under "Taste," is online under "Taste/Food."'"

Maybe I should apply to be a journalist

[jpopper]

I'm boring, straight to the point, and can't be creative even if my life was on the line. Hire me!

Content

[Dante Shamest]

If a site's content is good, people come regardless.

Slashdot's popularity is an anomaly though...

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[Breakfast Pants]

But Slashdot isn't a newspaper, is it?

Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sacramento Bee changed online section titles. "Real Estate" became "Homes," "Scene" turned into "Lifestyle," and dining information found in newsprint under "Taste," is online under "Taste/Food."'"

"Sex" turned into "Scatting on a midget who's being busy with a horse"

Re:This is a good thing

[dsci]

search engines are dong us all

Truer words were never spoken.

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[kfg]

Used to be to start a fire you took two sticks of about the same size and .....

then went looking for someone who actually knew how to start a fire, with two appropriately different sized sticks.

KFG

Re:Creativity in Journalism?

[kfg]

Copy editors write the headlines

I've got a few of those among my family and friends.

One of them lost his job over "32 Scoot to Shoot with Plane Aflame."

I'm afraid I wasn't terribly sympathetic.

KFG

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[Dun Malg]

Used to be to start a fire you took two sticks of about the same size and .....

then went looking for someone who actually knew how to start a fire, with two appropriately different sized sticks.

Surely the second part of his unfinished sentence was: "...and bang them together while shouting 'someone give me matches!'"

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[Anonymous Coward]

When blogging I make extremely long and descriptive headlines that use nearly full sentences and sometimes have witty double meanings or I relate two stories from seperate paragraphs in the same blog entry

Why do you feel the need to do this? Why do you feel the need to 'blog' at all? Do you not think the 1.5 million other people posting the exact same click-through-ad-links you are is insufficient?

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[D H NG]

A pun in headline [wikipedia.org].

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[onebecoming]

Oh, c'mon, lighten up! Who among us could resist headlines [newyorkmetro.com] like:

SOMOZA SLAIN BY BAZOOKA
(News, 1980)

HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR
(New York Post, 1982)

CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR
(Senate fails to convict Clinton; News, 1999)

...and my most recent favorite [gothamist.com]:

COPS MAKE BUTT-ER KNIFE CON SPREAD 'EM
(Post, natch)

On second thought, maybe you're right.

Re:Completely WRONG direction to take.

[Guppy06]

"people these days are engaging in what Linus Torvalds calls little more than a public wanking session trying to post comments more insightful than the rest."

Moderation: +1 Mentions Linus

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[raoul666]

This just reminded me of a story a teacher of mine passed along, which he heard from someone on the staff at a respected big-city newspaper.

Brezhnev, leader of the USSR, had just died, and so the staff of the paper was gathered to write up an article about his life, politics, death, etc. etc. Obviously, this would be front page news. The article was written quickly and easily enough, but the editorial staff argued for over 6 hours straight over whether or not to run it with the headline "HEAD RED DEAD."

Sadly, they decided against it.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[MartinB]

A journalist friend of a friend once made up an entire story about a library in Essex having its book budget cut just so he could use the headline (altogether now...):

BOOK LACK IN ONGAR

While a student, working on the campus newspaper, some anarchists invaded the stage at the student theatre, the Bedlam. This let me write the priceless (to my 20 yo ears) headline:

BEDLAM ANARCHY CHAOS

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'bots have got a better union :(

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[Varitek]

Oh, come on. "Headless body found in topless bar" is a work of genius. "Sick Gloria in transit Monday", also.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[Tim Browse]

I once worked for a Flight Simulator company, who came up with a rather innovative solution to the problem of displaying lights, especially at simulated night-time. The simulators cockpits are basically surrounded by a big curved mirror, onto which the final rasterised image is projected, to give a wraparound view. The projectors were called SPX projectors.

They found that if they just put the lights into the rasterised image that was displayed on the mirror, it looked a bit rubbish - pixelated, aliased etc. So someone came up with the idea of plotting point lights during the flyback period - they could control the beam on the way back to show up to N points of light (by flicking the beam on momentarily). I forget what N was. It looked significantly better, which is important when you're training to fly at night, as pretty much all you can see are landing lights, so you notice if it looks bad.

Anyway, they came up with the term 'calligraphic' to describe this technique - something to with it the beam being used in a more analogue, continuous way, I guess.

The real reason was, of course, so they could give the product this name:

Super Calligraphic Raster SPX Projectors

I apologise on their behalf.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[jdcook]

My all time favorite magazine cover is the Spetember 10-16, 1994 Economist which bears the headline "The Trouble with Mergers" which features two camels humping and the female looks decidedly unhappy. And yes, I used humping deliberately.

Re:God forbid...

[Angostura]

First off, someone is confusing "section headings" and "headlines". Second you are conflating misleading, confusing headlines with ones that use language imaginatively.

I've written some headlines in my time; getting something to fit to the page, convey the meaning and (hopefully) be elegant is an art. The occasional pun is no bad thing.

I remember the story of a UK national newspaper sub-seditor who had a headline all made up in hot metal which sat above his head for on a wall for years on the off-chance that the suitable event occurred. It never did.

The event? He wanted Michael Foot (labour party leader) to be put in charge of the organisation monitoring IRA decommissioning.

The headline?

Foot Heads Arms Body.

Ah well.

Too Bad

[hotspotbloc]

Back in the '70s I remember one of the many classic New York Post headlines:

CANNABAL IN NEW YORK
Human BBQ Bash in Bronx

God bless the New York Post. (...sniff...)

Re:God forbid...

[hotdiggitydawg]

My personal favourite was the one about the psychic dwarf that escaped from a mental asylum. It read "Small Medium at Large"...

Re:Content

[T-Ranger]

I always liken it to Saturday Night Live. Every time you come/watch you say to yourself "damm, I remember back in the day when this was good". And then you realized that it always sucked.

Re:This is a good thing

[sconeu]

ooking up on Wikipedia, there are 182 million speakers of French, of whom 87 are native.

And all 87 of those people live in Quebec.

Re:Maybe this ain't so bad

[mykdavies]

On a similar vein, when Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club managed the unlikely feat of beating Celtic 3-1 in February 2000, the Sun headline was:

Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious