By David Michelmore
AME/News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Heads are a little like poetry. (Not a lot, but a little.) There's no room for extraneous words. The formats are uncompromising. How they sound counts. How they look counts. And getting just the right word is what makes them fun.
Take this head on a story about a discovery about Mars: "Study finds another drop of evidence that Mars once was wet." It is not a show-stopping head, but it has two nice parts to it: the double-meaning in "drop" and the triple w-rhyme of "once was wet." And it accurately sums up the story.
That's a straight head and it's usually enough. Because many readers are going to stop at the headlines, we need to make sure we give them the news they need. No mysteries. Straight ahead. And it has to be news. "Teslovich found guilty of sex charges." If readers say about a head, "I don't get why this story is here," then we've failed.
Many stories, of course, don't reduce neatly to a short sentence -- or if they do, it's not a very interesting sentence -- and we're forced to come up with a head that is more suggestive than declarative and tells readers that it'll be worth reading this whole story, not just the lead or the nut graph.
I think those heads are like good billboards, suggestive enough to draw you in but not bludgeon you. The Citizens Bank billboard put up just before it took over Mellon -- something like, "First, we got rid of all those ATM fees" -- was a good one. Bank customers who have been irked for years by Mellon's niggling charges knew just what Citizens was talking about.
We do these billboard heads all through the paper. Some are phrases. Some are sentences. Some work. Some don't. What you don't want is a billboard head that forces people to read all the way through the story to figure out what it means or that really doesn't reflect the mood or message of the story. We do this all the time.
The trick on these, I think, is in assuming the right amount of familiarity with the reader, knowing how much the reader knows already, and using as many other clues -- particularly photos -- as you can to get the meaning across. I like this head on a Health story about the somewhat suspect eye exercise therapy: "Roll your eyes." It's not a nut graph, but it's suggestive enough to draw you in.
