Bald-headed chief copy
editor Lew Fournier sits at the far end of the Toronto
Sun newsroom
dressed in blue jeans and a black T-shirt. His desk is a cluttered mess
of printouts and Coffee Time cups. After he finishes editing a story,
Fournier heads over to Jim Baine’s desk, where the news editor has
the next day’s front page on his computer screen. There’s a photograph
of a police officer kneeling over shards of broken glass on the right,
but the left side remains blank, waiting for a headline. The photo is
from an early morning shooting at the Duke of York, an east-end pub,
which led to the death of an innocent bystander. Crime and the local
hockey team are the Sun’s front-page staples, and
even though the Toronto Maple Leafs are playing their provincial rivals,
the Ottawa Senators, on two TVs at the front of the room, crime is tonight’s
winner.
Baine asks Fournier what
he thinks the headline should be, and Fournier offers “Warning came
too late for innocent woman.” It’s accurate, but dry. He tries again:
“What about ‘Hazard of Duke’?” Still unsatisfied, Baine scans
through Tamara Cherry’s story and comes across a quote from a bar
patron who says people were screaming, “Get down, get down.” Baine
types these words onto the page. That’s all there is to it when it
comes to deciding on the paper’s front-page headline. There aren’t
any big meetings or brainstorming sessions at Toronto’s Other Voice,
just a news editor at his desk, taking suggestions from his copy team.
These days at the Sun,
there are no headline editors acting as middlemen between the copy editors
and the proofreaders, not that there are any proofreaders anymore either.
Parent-company Quebecor has been slashing jobs across the chain rather
than beefing up the paper.
Tabloid headlines are
short and punchy. Broadsheets emphasize facts over flash. But as online
news becomes the medium of record, keyword-loaded, Google-friendly headlines
are replacing both. Even when a story isn’t particularly exciting,
a good headline can grab the reader’s attention. But putting a dull
headline on a dull story will have people turning to blogs faster than
you can say search-engine optimization. The problem’s plain to see—too
much technology—and with major cutbacks at Canwest and Quebecor in
late 2008, newspapers no longer have the staff or resources to spend
a lot of time perfecting their headlines like they once did.
*
* *
The history of headline
writing is tied to the history of typesetting. From the 1800s through
the 1960s, newspaper pages were composed using Linotype or Ludlow machines,
which poured hot lead into moulds of words that were ultimately used
to make up pages. Flexibility was not a strong suit of hot-metal composition:
if a story was too long, excess type was simply lopped off, which is
why news copy was written to be cut from the bottom. Writing headlines
to a strict character count was an essential skill for the hot-metal
generation.
That’s not to say copy
editors didn’t have some fun with headlines in those days. In Sunburned: Memoirs of
a Newspaperman,
Douglas Creighton recalls a particularly unfortunate headline from his
early days at the Toronto
Telegram in the
1940s. “(His wife) Marilyn’s family’s next-door neighbour was
a nice chap named Albert Virgin. He was a provincial government bureaucrat
who had just been promoted. Marilyn’s mother thought it would be a
good idea to write a nice story about him. Naturally, we all thought
it was a good idea. Once again, the story was fine but the headline
read: ‘Change of life for A Virgin.’”
The ironclad restrictions
on headlines loosened up in the 1970s with the introduction of photo
typesetting, and then again with desktop publishing in the 1990s. Although
the technology changed, the purpose of a headline remained the same.
“In general terms, it has to engage the reader,” says Baine. “It
has to grab the reader by the lapels and say, ‘You’ve got to read
this story!’”
No one knows this better
than Fournier, the Sun’s go-to headline guy, who
was the paper’s headline editor for about a decade. While he says
he stepped down from that position this past August, others suggest
that the Sun’s restructuring dumped the
duties of a copy editor back into his lap. Before coming to the Sun,
Fournier worked at the Toronto
Star, where John
Miller, founding editor of the Sunday
Star, remembers
him as a brilliant junior copy editor. Miller’s favourite Fournier
head is “Yes, Virginia, there is an Atlanta cause,” which accompanied
a story about the governor of Georgia stepping down, and his wife Virginia
running to replace him. But when I ask Fournier about his time at the Star, it’s the gems that weren’t
fit to print he remembers most. When Colonel Sanders died, for example,
the Star wouldn’t print Fournier’s
suggested headline “Colonel kicks the bucket.” “Great headlines
don’t make it at the Star,” he says, “because it’s
a family newspaper where they don’t want to offend anyone.”
Great headline writers
have a certain off-the-wall character that can’t be taught and isn’t
easy to explain, according to Fournier. When I ask him how he comes
up with headlines, his answer catches me off guard. “I go for a piss,”
he tells me between sips of beer at the Jason George, where he goes
after work once or twice a week. Wait, what? “Yeah, I go for a piss.
It clears the mind, just staring at those plain white walls for a couple
minutes.” He then mentions a couple of classics he came up with in
the washroom, headlines such as “Pink finks sink rinks,” which graced
the front page in March 2008 when the paper blamed left-wing city councillors
for closing outdoor hockey rinks early.
At 65, Fournier has watched
several hockey seasons come and go as an outspoken Montreal Canadiens
fan at a paper that loves the Leafs. And while he’s still healthy
enough to drink a young journalist under the table, he’s pissed that
his craft is dying—at least at the Sun. To illustrate his point, he
brought along examples of recent Sun headlines that weren’t up
to snuff. “Spending like drunken sailors” flashed across the front
page of a recent Saturday paper, but who was spending like drunken sailors?
Well, no one. The quote came from a councillor who said his staff would spend like drunken sailors if
the city gave them credit cards, so the headline wasn’t entirely accurate.
And being accurate is the number-one rule of headline writing. So, what’s
rule number two? “Headlines have to be interesting,” says Fournier.
“The words have to jump out.”
When I meet copy editor
Scott Howarth at the
Star, he has
a hard time finding any headlines that jump out from the previous day’s
paper. “I’m sorry that we’re more boring than normal today,”
he tells me as he flips through the October 27 edition, praising a few
headlines for accuracy, but none for zip. Howarth doesn’t believe
his craft is dying, although he’s convinced that the best headline
writers are the older, crankier ones. Guys like Fournier, who he later
suggests I should get in touch with. “Younger copy editors don’t
have the institutional knowledge that comes with age,” he says, adding
that he doesn’t mean to offend me.
Unlike the streamlined
headline-writing process at the Sun, more people get involved at
the Star, ensuring consistency, accuracy—and
a more subdued tone. There’s also the slot editor, who Howarth calls
“one of the final arbiters of fact and taste.” More than just a
proofreader, the slot copy-edits the copy editors and rewrites the headlines
he doesn’t like. On November 6, I watched as Tom Goldstein, the Star’s foreign slot, replaced “Determined,
dim and definitely a diva” with “McCain aides tell of Palin’s
daft ways” for a story on the U.S. vice-presidential not-to-be. The
former is cleverer, but the latter is more accurate, and I guess the Star prefers the use of daft to dim.
Alas, while editors spend more time on headlines at Canada’s largest
daily newspaper, they seem to have less fun.
Although headline puns
can be fun, they don’t always get the point of the story across. Miller,
who teaches both students and pros how to write better heads, says the
overuse of puns makes it a dying art, and he feels copy editors need
to ponder the story more instead of going for the cheap gag. Howarth
agrees, saying punny headlines are often a quick fallback and a lazy
way out when facing deadline pressure.
Scott Colby, a team editor
at the Star, says he would change anything
with an uninformative pun when he was Entertainment page editor. But
now that he’s moved on to a different role, and now oversees five
different beats, he’s noticed a lot more puns in the paper. “They’re
doing a story about Alfred Sung, the designer,” he says, looking at
the front of the Living section, “and the headline is ‘Sungs and
lovers.’ And what does that mean? It’s a play on words, but it doesn’t
tell me anything. So that’s the kind of headline that I personally
don’t like.” Whether it’s due to laziness, or being so busy that
a copy editor goes four hours without taking a piss (as I’m told sometimes
happens at the Star), punny headlines are often
the result of a lack of inspiration. Having a slot or page editor helps
to ensure lazy puns don’t make it into the newspaper.
But not all papers have
that luxury. At the National
Post, copy editors
are also page editors. “It’s their responsibility to do everything
for that page,” explains Laura Morrison, who’s been at the Post since its second year. “They
lay the page out, they edit the copy, and then they write the headlines
and the cutlines.” She says the paper’s copy editors are always
hard at work. “I often think, ‘Oh, it would be so nice to work for
a magazine and have hours to think about what headline I’m going to
write,’ but you don’t have that luxury in newspapers because of
deadlines. It’s sort of the nature of the beast.”
*
* *
But the beast may be
dying as readership levels drop and owners try to do more with less.
According to the Canadian Association of Journalists, over 1,200 people
lost their jobs at news organizations in the last three months of 2008.
A couple of months after I sat in the Sun newsroom, the paper laid off
its three proofreaders, putting more onus on copy editors to ensure
a typo-free newspaper—and giving them less time to focus on headlines.
The Sun’s copy desk also shrank as
two senior copy editors took buyouts that allowed co-workers to keep
their jobs. One of the copy editors who left was Fournier. “They made
such a mash of the paper that it’s no fun working there anymore,”
he says. “They seem to appreciate amateurism more than professionalism,
so it was time to go.”
Fournier’s not the
kind of guy who’d have fun writing heads for the web, since search
engines aren’t programmed to value his sense of humour. But his successors
at the Sun will have to learn to keep Google
in mind when dealing with online stories. In a 2006 article from The New York Times’ website entitled “This
boring headline is written for Google,” Steve Lohr describes the effect
of search-engine optimization on news media’s web content. One example
Lohr gives is that of BBC News, which writes two headlines
for each story: a clever one for readers and a just-the-facts one for
search engines. As Lohr laments, “There are no algorithms for wit,
irony, humour or stylish writing.”
When I asked various
copy editors to come up with their all-time favourite headlines, one
that many considered legendary was “Headless body in topless bar,”
from a 1983 New
York Post story
about a strip-club murder. It was also one of several classic headlines
deemed search-engine unfriendly by Stephan Spencer, president and founder
of search-engine optimization (SEO) company Netconcepts. “No
New Yorker searching Google, Yahoo News, etc., for local crime news
would have found this story,” he told CNET News staff writer Elinor Mills.
“It needs to include ‘crime’ and/or ‘murder,’ along with some
location-based keywords like ‘Manhattan’ or ‘NYC.’”
Some American papers,
including The
New York Times
and The
Boston Globe,
are using SEO to increase their presence on
Google. According to Lohr, search engines deliver 30 percent or more
of the traffic on certain news sites, and traffic means readers and
advertisers at a time when the mainstream media are trying desperately
to make a living on the web. In Canada, the concept has also taken off
at the Star and the Post but copy editors at the Sun
chain aren’t writing headlines with Google in mind. “When you’re
writing a headline, you’re hoping there’s one person out there that
you can make her or his day with it,” says Neate Sager, an Ottawa Sun copy editor who told me he doesn’t
even consider search engines when writing headlines in his sports blog.
“If you make someone smile or maybe get a chuckle out of them, I think
that makes it worthwhile.”
With major newspapers
publishing online and pay walls coming down, news junkies now have a
lot of options when it comes to getting their fixes. Though it might
be one of the oldest tricks in the book, a punchy headline is still
a strong selling point. But crafting powerful headlines is no easy task,
regardless of what newspaper owners think as they cut the ranks of copy
editors and expect their staff to do more work with fewer resources.
It takes talent.
The first time I walked
into the Toronto
Sun newsroom,
Fournier was going over a story about bar owner Edward Allen, whose
bruised and swollen face had been front-page news the day before, when
he was allegedly beaten by 20 police officers. After going over the
copy and writing a section head, Fournier got up from his chair and
asked me to try my hand at writing the headline.
Although he caught me
off guard, I didn’t want to disappoint him with a subpar head, so
I scanned the story for the most important details before typing “Bar
owner says he’ll sue cops” into the text box. In a stroke of beginner’s
luck, my headline fit the space perfectly. Fournier told me it wasn’t
bad, but it was missing something. After playing around with a few different
words, he ended up with “Cops face suit over alleged bar beating.”
It only took him a few minutes, but then again, he is a master. And
now that he’s gone? “You’ll get a whole bunch of quotation headlines
that really don’t mean anything, since you’ll have to guess what
they mean,” he says. “There’s not much skill to writing them.”
Sadly, Lew Fournier has a point.
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