Good headlines sometimes break rules

Journalism, like other professions, has its share of professional jargon and traditional ways of doing things that might seem a mystery to the general public.

Among the poorly hidden “secrets” that a relatively few “outsiders” might know about is that reporters don’t write headlines.

As I tell school groups that visit and tour The Enterprise, there is a whole group of highly devoted and hard-working people called copy editors who work in a group called the copy desk. They take all the stories, photos, graphics and other elements that come from various sources and put them into one cohesive, attractively packaged product that becomes your daily newspaper.

They also write the headlines.

One of their jobs is to take what sometimes is a very complicated story and put it into four or five words. They are supposed to be words that will attract the readers’ attention; words that properly summarize the story; words that will fit in the space that they have designed --- and above all they have to be spelled right. Oh, and it helps if they are very clever and well-thought out. And they do this on a very tight, very high-pressure deadline.

Needless to say, headline writing is a highly-developed talent. The Enterprise has several very good headline writers. We also have one who is among the best, having won multiple national and statewide awards for his clever headlines – most recently a first place in Texas Associated Press Managing Editors competition.

That said, readers also need to know that headline writing is an evolving art.

A glance at historic newspapers will show any reader that most headlines from early in the last century were one column wide and three (or four) lines deep. They required several short words.

In the 1970s when I got my formalized journalism education, headline writing included a lot of rules, like every headline had to have a verb -- a present-tense active verb. And, above all, no headline – not even any single line of a multiple-line headline could end with a preposition. Never, ever.

Of course then, we also typed headlines on small slips of paper and counted each one of them (literally, counted the letters with assigned values for various letters depending on if they were thick – as in a capital M – or thin as in a lower case l).

Journalists of the time like myself also were taught that our stories were to be written using words and sentence structure that was easily understood by someone with an eighth grade education.

That’s important because I, like everyone in and out of journalism, have to recognize that times have changed. Journalism, though presented in an educated form, reflects the habits and the language of the everyday reader.

Several years ago we ran a headline, in huge type across the front page. The headline had the word “who” used as an object rather than a subject. In short, had the headline been grammatically correct, it would have said “whom” rather than “who.” Using whom, however, would also have made the headline sound forced and rigid. Instead of drawing a reader into the story, it would have made them stop and diagram the headline to think about if we had used the word properly or not.

So, we CHOSE to run a grammatically incorrect headline that would sound more conversational and best serve its intended purpose: to get the reader to read the story.

A few teachers, one young student and some others we sometimes refer to as "the grammar police” objected to our choice. We made it anyway.

That’s one of the new rules of journalism – you’re allowed to break the rules, but only if you know the rules you are breaking and make a conscious decision to break them – and if it is in the best interest of the reader.

So, to those of you who find grammatical mistakes in headlines, including an offending preposition at the end -- feel free to call. You might catch us in an error, which we will gladly correct, but there’s also a chance you are merely witnessing the evolution of journalism as we continue to serve our readers.