Headlines for a Web Audience

In my crony's previous post, she wrote about catchy or punchy art heads (I spell it with the a), and how designers can blow them up big and play with typography in the absence of photos or a better idea.

Soon, though, art heads will be no more.

Since this blog is technically about all the things that will die when newspapers do, I figured I'd spend a moment to talk about Web headlines. Yes, they are different from newspaper headlines.

On a typical front page, for example, The BG News front page on Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010, the centerpiece is graced with a punny art head: "University rakes in new students." A few, short words get the point across, and the story is further explained by the deck head below.

But this same story might have a revised headline for the Web, something like: "Bowling Green State University rakes in new students for Fall Preview Day." This is a fine headline, but there are now more words, making it less eye-catching and more cumbersome to say.

These headlines get changed for something called search-engine optimization. Newspapers want readers to find their websites, so they plug headlines with as many specific words as possible. When the headline just said "University," not many people would find that story through a search, because there are a lot of universities. But there is only one Bowling Green State University.

Gene Weingarten, a pulitzer-prize winning journalist at The Washington Post, wrote a column about this very phenomenon. His point was that newspaper headlines were losing their original magic when being revised for online readers.

But every once in a while, readers can still stumble across something like this.

Headlines aren't dead yet.