Two
weeks ago I signed up for a Twitter account, and if you follow the news you’ve
probably noticed that the world has become a worse place since then. Sorry
about that, but it was a business necessity. With a new book, The McHenry Inheritance, http://www.quillgordonmystery.com coming out
soon, the experts said I had to join the 21st Century and use social
media to promote it.
Part
of me (actually, just about all of me) rebels against that. I’ve been on
Facebook and LinkedIn for over a year but was a Twitter holdout. I don’t like
the superficiality of the format, and signing on to follow hundreds or
thousands of people is like begging to have junk mail sent to you. On the other
hand, the first time I tweeted about one of these blog posts, the number of
hits went up twenty five-fold. No sense in arguing with success.
Twitter Is Easy; Headlines Are Hard
One
of the things that surprises me when I talk about this is the number of people
who comment on how hard it is to keep a message to Twitter’s limit of 140
characters. It’s true that with the exception of Benjamin Franklin (who, in Poor Richard’s Almanack, penned the
first tweets), none of the Founding Fathers could have done it or wanted to.
But
I worked at a newspaper for two decades and wrote thousands of headlines.
Headline-writing is, in my mind, the most technically difficult job in the
newspaper business. Not many people did it well when I was in the game, and as
budgets get slashed and fewer people are around to mentor the newbies, things
have only gotten worse. The New York Times still does headline-writing with
grace and skill, but few other papers do. Of course as more and more of the
news is on the web, where space isn’t an issue, perhaps it doesn’t matter.
It
takes a certain twist of mind and verbal skill to summarize a complex news
story in 36 characters. That’s even more true when you have to do it in three
lines, each of which has to be no less than 10 and mo more than 12 characters
long. That’s tough, and when you’ve done it enough times, sticking to 140
characters, with no line breaks, is a walk in the park.
The Headline Writer’s Challenge
Sometimes
it’s even tougher than what I just described. In October of 1975, New York City was in a financial crisis
and facing bankruptcy. The city was hoping for federal assistance to get
through, but President Gerald M. Ford announced that he would veto any federal
bailout that Congress might pass.
It
was a major story, and the Daily News
decided to make the headline so huge it would take up half the front page. Here
was the technical challenge: Summarize the story in a two-line headline, with a
count of no more than ten for each line and no less than eight. For the purpose
of counting, all letters stood as one character, except for I and T, which
counted as half, and M and W which were one and a half. Punctuation marks
counted as half, and the space between words could count as one character, half
a character or a character and a half as needed.
It
was an impossible assignment, but after rejecting several more pedestrian
alternatives, Managing Editor William J. Brink resolved the issue by going
vernacular and outside the box. His headline will be a legend as long as
newspapers are remembered:
FORD TO CITY:
DROP DEAD
