It’s a tough job, but a good headline knows how to do it!

We learned last week about writing leads. This week, it was nice to add headlines to that. A good lead probably doesn’t go anywhere without a good headline first; especially when reading online. News websites like KSL, KUTV or the New York Times online all have headlines with links to the actual story. If t he headline isn’t interesting, a lot of readers won’t even try the link and the lead won’t ever be read. Headlines are extremely important.

I’ve actually never written a headline before so it was really fun to do the headline writing assignment. It was hard to try and pick a few of the most important words in the story to form a headline. A headline has to do so many things! It must catch the reader’s attention, tell enough about the story to be interesting, not tell too much to give it all away and ultimately get the reader to click the link or read the story. It’s a tough job, but a good headline knows how to do it!

The editing mishap I found this week was actually on a Daisy Maids van. I tried to take a picture but it turned the corner before I could…and it’s illegal to drive and text so I imagine it’s illegal to drive and take a picture…shhhh. So, anyway, the Daisy Maids slogan is “you're gonna love us, we're your daisy maids.” Yes, it’s obviously intentional that they put “gonna” instead of “going to” but it’s still a grammatical error. Also, the van advertisement was missing the all important comma!