One more fact about Ms. Momsen: she has nothing to do with this column, let alone the headline. But her very name is a prized key word online — just the thing to push my column to the top of Google rankings.
Headlines in newspapers and magazines were once written with readers in mind, to be clever or catchy or evocative. Now headlines are just there to get the search engines to notice. In that context, “Jon Stewart Slams Glenn Beck” is the beau ideal of great headline writing. And both Twitter and Facebook have become republishers, with readers on the hunt for links with nice, tidy headlines crammed full of hot names to share with their respective audiences.
Keep in mind that all of the things that make headlines meaningful in print — photographs, placement and context — are nowhere in sight on the Web. Headlines have become, as Gabriel Snyder, the recently appointed executive editor of Newsweek.com, “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.”
Some of them are a little more naked than others.
“Taylor Momsen Goes Pantsless, Curses on Morning Television” suggested a headline on The Huffington Post’s “most popular” feature on Friday. She didn’t actually appear bottomless, but that’s part of the trick of writing digitally snappy headlines. It seems almost tasteful next to an MSN take: “Taylor Momsen Vomits On-Stage, Wants to Be Kurt Cobain.”
The Huffington Post knows its way around search engine optimization, or S.E.O. as it’s known. A story about whether the president would play golf with Rush Limbaugh was headlined: “Obama Rejects Rush Limbaugh Golf Match: Rush ‘Can Play With Himself.’ ” It’s digital nirvana: two highly searched proper nouns followed by a smutty entendre, a headline that both the red and the blue may be compelled to click, and the readers of the site can have a laugh while the headline delivers great visibility out on the Web.
The Huffington Post sometimes tests two different headlines in real time to see which the audience is responding to. (“How to Reduce Your Oil Footprint” did better than “How to Say No to Big Oil and Reduce Your Oil Footprint.” Go figure.) The site also uses its Twitter account to solicit reader suggestions on headlines. Arianna Huffington, editor in chief and a founder of the site, rejects any notion that it is dumbing down in search of eyeballs.
“We do ironic headlines, smart headlines, and work hard to make very serious stories as interesting as we can,” she said by phone. “We pride ourselves on bringing in our community on which headlines work best.”
Ms. Huffington added, “While we work on and talk about our home page headlines a lot, the keywords or searchability is never determinative.”
Still, it’s a long way from the poetics of the best of print headlines. And not just The New York World at the turn of the century, which had wedding cake headlines that spilled gloriously down the page. Think of the expansive headline on The Wall Street Journal’s article on passengers trapped on a Northwest flight:
“Frozen Northwest: ‘I’m opening a door!’ ‘No, no, don’t do it!’ ‘How about a valium?’
“Tension on a crowded plane nears the breaking point as it festers, snowbound — A call to Mr. and Mrs. C.E.O.”
There’s no room for that kind of discursive, descriptive run-on on the Web, where “Northwest Fritters, Passengers Freak” would work better. Google’s crawlers and aggregators like Digg quit paying attention after 60 characters or so, long before readers might.
Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, has ridiculed witty as the new dumb in his memos to staff, saying, “If you want to indulge yourself with Onion-style headlines, work for The Onion.”
As a reader, I see his point. When I scan my list of aggregated articles in an RSS feed, looking for information that I seem to need to know right now, I am ruthless: the obscure, the off-beat, the mysterious, frequently go unclicked.
But it leads to a sameness that can make all the information seem as if it were generated by the same traffic-loving robot. On Friday, two headlines from Reuters and Silicon Alley Insider about Google Street View camera cars that were unintentionally collecting data from unsecured wireless connections showed up two minutes apart in my RSS feed. Both started with “Whoops!” Whoops.Nobody is suggesting that the Web should somehow accommodate the rococo glories of The New York Observer’s headlines in that paper’s prime. But the need to attract attention from computer-generated algorithms sometimes makes the headlines seem like a machine thought them up as well.
“We reject the idea that there are only two options, between a really creative and a boring headline. There is a lot of sunlight between those two options,” said Jim Brady, general manager of Politico’s coming local Washington site called TBD.com. “The headlines don’t have to be boring, but they have to be descriptive and direct so that they show up in mobile and RSS feeds in a way that lets people know what they are being asked to click on.”
Still, Mr. Brady, the former executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, says that there are print charms that can’t be replicated because of the relative lack of context on the Web. A New York native and a tabloid fan, he said, “ ‘Ivana Be Left Alone’ is a great headline, but it wouldn’t work on the Web because there’s no Trump in there and anybody looking for that information would be looking for Trump.”
Thus, last week’s New York Post headline for an article about a woman who seemed to be smitten with the president went from “Saucy G.O.P.-er Dishes the Flirt” to “Buffalo Woman Stuns Obama with Spicy Pickup Line.”
People who worry that Web headlines dumb down public discourse are probably right. But some of the classics would still work. Remember “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” perhaps the most memorable New York Post headline ever? It’s direct, it’s descriptive, and it’s oh-so-search-engine-friendly. And not a Taylor Momsen in sight.
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