”Away We Go.”
”$3,000.”
Tomorrow Is Another Day.
Original, clinker titles — headlines, if you will — to works that became known as “Oklahoma!,” “Pretty Woman” and Gone With the Wind.
Good thing the folks pushing those entertainments thought twice, or 100 times, about what to call their musical, film and novel and came up with better and more pointed titles with which to engage the public.
Then again, they probably had the luxury of time to come up with just the right words.
Pity the poor copy editor — who doesn’t have that luxury.
Copy editors are the mostly unsung staffers at a newspaper who perform a raft of gatekeeping and lifesaving duties, not the least of which is writing headlines. Reporters don’t write the headlines on their stories, copy editors do. And copy editors have to put those sparely worded titles atop pieces that are more complicated than “Pretty Woman,” don’t have the toe-tap factor of “Oklahoma!” and are not nearly as melodramatic as Gone With the Wind.
Each day, copy editors at The Courier-Journal write scores of headlines. Last Friday, for example, I counted at least 210 news headlines in the newspaper, and they ranged from the Gaza pullout to the opening of the state fair to the renaming of a casino to the iffy prospects of formal dining out.
The main rule for all headlines, said C-J Day News Editor Jim Kirchner, is that they tell the reader what the story’s about.
Sound simple?
Not so fast there, bud.
Headlines must also be accurate and fair, Kirchner said.
They must fit and fill the space allotted.
The tone of a headline has to be consistent with the nature of the story.
The headline can’t take the reader to a point beyond what has been stated in the story.
And, not last or least, they ought to make the reader want to be a reader of the story.
No wonder that John McIntyre, former president of the American Copy Editors Society who is an assistant managing editor at the Baltimore Sun, likens writing headlines to a combination of playing Scrabble and completing a crossword puzzle. (See accompanying sidebar for more with McIntyre.)
So, given that degree of difficulty, it’s also no wonder that readers, sounding as stern as yesteryear’s East German judges, let me know when they think they catch a clinker title or two in the pages of The Courier. Recent examples:
” ‘Sympathetic Bush says leaving Iraq is wrong’ paints an entirely different and misleading picture of the Cindy Sheehan story. Obviously, if the President was in fact sympathetic, he would have talked with her on the day she arrived. . . . Once again, The Courier has taken sides in the most insidious of ways. Painting the story via the headings. Shame on you.”
“Nobody down there in the C-J’s policy department ever takes responsibility for the headlines. It’s like little men from Mars stick them in there, and we don’t know where they come from. Today’s a time when years of careful, thoughtful reporting on religious affairs got set back when some Martian labeled the main body of Lutherans in the USA a ‘sect.’ I know it’s a handy, short word with a vaguely religious connotation, but there’s no way any branch of the Lutherans, who originated the Reformation ‘way back when, meet any but the remotest definition of the word.”
” ‘Judge Roberts: Bad for the disabled?’ . . . Editors: Who are ‘the’ disabled? That linguistic form has a very long, and very negative history, ‘the’ blacks, ‘the’ Jews, among others. Transferring it to yet another group is not ethical journalism. Establishing an abstract ‘the’ is the primary linguistic tool of stereotype.”
I asked McIntyre, via e-mail, for his take on these criticisms.
Briefly, his written responses, which also are instructive in the difficulties faced in writing clear, crisp, accurate and fair headlines:
” ‘Sympathetic Bush’ would trouble me because it imputes an emotion or attitude, suggesting that we know something about the inner workings of someone else’s mind. ‘Bush expresses sympathy, stays firm on Iraq’ or something of the sort would be more neutral and factual.”
“Calling Lutherans a ‘sect’ probably does carry a negative charge. . . . ‘Denomination’ is a long word for a headline — I sympathize with the copy editor — but ‘sect’ reads as ‘faction,’ though not as opprobrious as ‘cult’ would have been. ‘Religion’ would also be wrong, because Lutheranism is a denomination within a religion.”
“I would have to see the story about disabled people to see whether the term is appropriate for the headline, but the head suggests that it is about legal issues. In that case, there should be no objection. Laws pertain to specified classes of people, and an article about such a class of people affected should identify those people clearly.”
The great thing about newspapering — for those in need of vacation, it’s also the bane of the biz — is that we always get another chance to do it right or to do it better.
Or, as was almost said in a title that eventually bit the dust, Tomorrow Is Another Day.
Take two.
Several readers recently suggested that a couple of us here at The Courier-Journal aren’t ready for our close-ups, reference-wise anyway.
Regarding my Aug. 8 column, in which I cited Clairee of “Steel Magnolias” for uttering “If you can’t say anything nice, come sit next to me,” two readers nudged me away from the movie theater and toward the history books. That’s where I would have found that Alice Roosevelt Longworth — “Washington’s other monument,” as one letter-writer called her — said that at least 50 years before Clairee did. (And the exact quote by Longworth was, “If you can’t say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.”)
And regarding a quote atop the Aug. 15 Forum page, where Spencer Tracy was credited for lines he thundered as Henry Drummond (retooled Clarence Darrow) in the 1960 film “Inherit the Wind,” a reader told us that the play upon which Tracy’s movie was based was written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. “To attribute the words to Tracy is like citing Olivier for ‘To be or not to be . . . ‘, ” the reader wrote.
We stand reminded that art imitates life. But don’t ask me who said that first.
