E-Media Tidbits

We have covered information in headlines here at E-Media Tidbits before, and I for one have welcomed more informative headlines. I use RSS feeds a lot, and those smart headlines that seem so perfect when connected to a picture or background story just don't cut it when they appear unattached.

NYTimes.com published a story on similar subject today, "This Boring Headline Is Written for Google." It claims that headlines are now increasingly written for Google and not for human readers. That means more factual and less smart. Wit, irony and cultural allusions are lost.

This criticism may be accurate, but it does have a positive side: We (humans) can expect to more easily understand what's behind that headline in a "latest news" list or an RSS feed.

I did a study for large Norwegian news site a couple of years ago, where I found that 12 percent of the headlines appearing in lists were useless, in the sense that they did not give me a chance to decide whether I was interested or not. Displaced from the original article, they were of no value. A typical example was the headline: "Grey Ford Escort." That was for an article about a (wait for it...) grey Ford Escort that was missing in a criminal case.

So if there is a choice between boring and useless, I suggest going for boring. In the Escort case, the headline combined the boring and the useless. Don't do that.