Headline news is a type of journalism that is focused on identifying a story’s most important information. It’s the first thing a reader sees when they open a newspaper or click on a link, and it serves as a crucial guide to whether they want to commit their time to read the rest of an article. Carefully crafted headlines are designed to inform and entice readers in a few words, while following AP style guidelines.
One of the most important lessons to learn from writing headlines is that every story has an angle. The challenge is to make that clear in the headline, especially since it also becomes part of the post’s url (Uniform Resource Locator) and gets a lot of “Google Juice” for search. This makes it tempting to get cute or clever, but the real goal is to be accurate and quickly grab attention.
Another important lesson is that you can’t assume your audience knows the background or context of a story. Many headlines use “fluff” to draw in readers, but a good writer always considers the “5 Ws” (who, what, when, where, and why) to provide a complete picture of the story. This is especially true on the web, where search results often display only the headline and a small snippet of the article, which can be misleading. Keeping these lessons in mind, along with the fact that people only have a few seconds to scan a headline before deciding whether or not to read it, will help you write effective news and feature headlines.