Headlines of 2010:
Man hit by car.
Bellevue fire.
The future of “witty wordplay” headlines that traditionally attracted readers to certain articles may be grim, according to Clive Thompson’s article “How Google News Is Changing The Way Newspaper Headlines are Written.”
According to Thompson, newspapers and online media news sources are beginning to change their prose style in order to be more easily brought up by search engines. Headlines based on puns or wordplays have created “the problem of synonymity,” which occurs when a machine sorts an article by simply the words of the headline, not the intended meaning of the headline or the actual genre of the story.
While technology has always affected journalism, I think we have reached a point where technology is beginning to have a negative impact on journalism. If people begin to create headlines only for the machines, I believe their readers will suffer and there will be a significant decrease in the sites popularity. This is because I personally believe creative headlines should remain a determining factor in distinguishing an article that is worth your time to read (dependent on the medium and intended audience, of course).
Fortunately, some news sites have began searching for ways to save their inventive headlines. One solution presented and used by the BBC is create two different headlines for each article, one which attracts the readers and one that is literal for the machines.
On the other hand, some sites such as Boing Boing, contribute some of their success to only using simple, factual headlines.
“Many people have dozens of blogs in their RSS readers, which means they’re scanning hundreds or even thousands of headlines a day – and thus scanning them at a lightning pace,” Boing Boing co-founder Cory Doctrow said. “If you write abstruse, punning headlines where the meaning isn’t immediately clear, the reader will never click on your entry.”
After reading Doctrow’s statements, I came to the same startling conclusion as Thompson: “So maybe optimizing for searchbots isn’t a bad idea – because you’ll also optimize for humanbots.”
As of now, I am remaining optimistic that technology will not turn us all into humanbots who no longer have the time or desire to enjoy traditional journalism. Thus I plan to continue to use imaginative headlines in my personal posts since I am not looking to develop an audience outside of this class now, but in the future I too might have to bow down to machine and change my ways in order to succeed.
How will journalism programs, such as the UW’s, adjust their headline writing curriculum to overcome the issue of search engine induced “synonymity”?
How will online articles that strive to be seen as traditional journalism be impacted if headlines do become straight literal?
