Deep Dive – Evolving Standards: Headlines in the Digital Age

Introduction

For this Media Deep Dive, we’re gonna need to put on our English teacher hats and do a little close reading…

But first: An interesting quirk about modern news websites is that their content is always in flux. Articles can be written, edited, and edited again. And the same goes for headlines. In fact, the impermanent nature of the web means that editors can experiment all day long if they please, testing which versions of a headline generate the most clicks and engagement.

So who’s to say what the headline on this article about the intersection of police accountability and technology ethics looks like now, but here’s the version I saw at 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 18:

“These cities bar facial recognition tech. Police still found ways to access it.”

Back in My Day…

My 10th grade journalism teacher made a few things very clear to us about headlines: Punctuation should be kept to a minimum (ideally nonexistent). They should be a single sentence, in present tense, with a clear subject and an active verb. They should be precise, leaving no room to question whom or what the story is about, and concise, getting to the point in no more words than absolutely necessary.

This headline violates almost all of those rules. And for good reason: most of them come from a long-gone time when print space was limited, attention spans were longer, and the authorial voice of newspapers was, well, stuffier.

Today, journalists are competing for your eyeballs with the likes of TikTok, YouTube, and all manner of digital diversions. Add to that the fact that many social media sites, such as Facebook, where people spend vasts amount of their time on the internet, have started to deemphasize traditional journalism in what they once referred to as their “news” feeds in an effort to “stay neutral” (more on that later) and keep out of so-called “divisive,” hot-button issues.

Staying Engaged

Considering all the distractions and displacement that journalists have to contend with to get you to read a story, it’s no surprise that the sort of high-potency, curiosity-hijacking language typically associated with spammy ads and “clickbait” (e.g. “This one weird trick eliminates belly fat!”) has crept its way into the online argot of even the stodgiest publications.

In this case, the Post’s editors have substituted actual locations with “these cities,” leading the reader to immediately wonder, “Which ones???” They’ve also split the headline into a provocative, one-two punch. While the first sentence matter-of-factly alludes to a fairly unsurprising solution to a relatively well-known issue, the second sentence ups the emotional ante by unexpectedly flipping the narrative. This is not, it turns out, a story about cities rising to the occasion to quash a modern ethical quandary; rather, it’s about the rise of a related yet brand new urban dilemma! The headline plays on the fact that readers do not want to be left in the dark—after all, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” according to the Post—and so you feel like you have no choice but to click the link and/or scroll down to see more.

We would have never published a headline like that in my high school paper, but you encounter that style of headline everywhere these days—largely because it works.

Searching Far and Wide

Before we wrap things up, it’s worth noting that there’s one place where you don’t see the article’s lengthy, two-part headline: in the search results on sites like Google or DuckDuckGo.

There is a technical reason for this. The headline that appears in the webpage’s <title> tag (the hidden piece of code that dictates the text that appears in your browser’s tab bar and, incidentally, in search results) is different: “Police in Austin, San Francisco skirt facial recognition ban.”

Interestingly, this is a headline that follows the old-school rules almost to a T. (We actually would have printed a headline like that in my high school paper.)

While it’s certainly possible the article was first published with the alternate headline but had it changed later, I would argue that the <title> tag’s shorter, more specific phrasing could very well be intentional if you look at it from the perspective of search engine optimization. For all the same reasons related to attention spans and digital noise that some headlines on webpages have become punchier, perhaps vaguer, and certainly click-baitier, it’s just as important that headlines in search results be as clear and informative as possible.

In a world where the optimal positions on results pages are reserved for paying customers, curated content, and, more recently, AI-generated summaries, publications need to fight the search engines’ algorithms for whatever top slots are left and make it really clear just how relevant their pages are to your specific query.

This means that the headlines and page descriptions seen by the bots that index the web, not to mention the people who view the search results, need to be brief (so readers can see the whole thing in a limited amount of space) and chock full of keywords (so that they’ll be surfaced by all kinds of searches).

Ironically, the economics, if you will, of search engine optimization may have effectively recreated some of the same conditions that led to the original rules of headline writing!

Next Up…

While the article at hand is largely about ethics, we mostly stayed out of that discussion in the first half of this Media Deep Dive. In Part 2, however, we’re going to wade right in as we consider some of the complicated nuances of objectivity in journalism.