In light of my “Headlines are hooks” post from last week, I’d be remiss not to flag this thoughtful David Carr column on Web headlines. He worries that the Web is making obsolete some of the artfulness that’s characterized headlines in the past:
When I scan my list of aggregated articles in an RSS feed, looking for information that I seem to need to know right now, I am ruthless: the obscure, the off-beat, the mysterious, frequently go unclicked.
But it leads to a sameness that can make all the information seem as if it were generated by the same traffic-loving robot. On Friday, two headlines from Reuters and Silicon Alley Insider about Google Street View camera cars that were unintentionally collecting data from unsecured wireless connections showed up two minutes apart in my RSS feed. Both started with “Whoops!” Whoops.
I agree with Jim Brady’s take on the question:
“We reject the idea that there are only two options, between a really creative and a boring headline. There is a lot of sunlight between those two options,” said Jim Brady, general manager of Politico’s coming local Washington site called TBD.com. “The headlines don’t have to be boring, but they have to be descriptive and direct so that they show up in mobile and RSS feeds in a way that lets people know what they are being asked to click on.”