72

Timothy P. Carney writes in the Washington Examiner in the article Let's stop arguing with headlines that the writer didn't write:

If you're not a journalist, here's a trade secret: The person who wrote an article often isn't the same person who wrote the headline.

Is that an accurate description? Is the headline usually written by someone else than the author?

Glorfindel
  • 1,452
  • 1
  • 17
  • 28
Christian
  • 33,271
  • 15
  • 112
  • 266
  • 6
    This is weird. Why is it even on-topic here? Are all factual statements up for review at skeptics.SE? – pipe Dec 22 '17 at 10:44
  • 4
    @pipe : Notable factual claims are generally on-topic here. In this case, the topic is additionally very helpful because knowing about how headlines are written helps with doing critical reading. That's why Oddthinking interlinked the meta question. – Christian Dec 22 '17 at 11:42

1 Answers1

91

The job role of writing headlines varies between organisations, but, yes, there are plenty of organisations where it is written by someone other than main author of the article.

Wikipedia can't be relied on here, but it gives an [unreferenced] overview of the situation.

[a headline] is generally written by a copy editor, but may also be written by the writer, the page layout designer, or other editors.

While I don't attempt to give precise numbers, I think these examples are sufficient to show that it is "often".

  • This job description of Press Sub-editor gives a general idea:

    [Press sub-editors, or subs] also lay out the story on the page, write headings and captions, and may be involved with overall page design.

  • New York Times explains:

    Readers often assume that reporters write their own headlines. In fact, they rarely do. Most headlines at The Times, print headlines in particular, are written by editors experienced in the task.

  • The Guardian has an article What do subeditors do?, which explains some of the attributes of how they write good headlines.

  • The Hollywood Reporter is advertising for a Senior Copy Editor. Duties include:

    Write headlines, deks, captions as needed to expedite copy flow

  • One journalist from The Sun was "aghast" at a headline that didn't match his story, showing they were written by different people.

    He said he had described the claims against Liverpool fans as ‘allegations’ in his piece. Mr Arnold said it was then editor Kelvin MacKenzie who wrote the headline ‘The Truth’ above the story.

On the other hand, some organisations give more of a role to the journalist.

  • In 2009, at the Financial Times, the role was pushed from the subeditor to the author, which was a big enough story for the Guardian to report on it:

    Financial Times reporters will have to subedit parts of their own stories, including writing draft headlines as the paper launches the next phase of its digital integration.

Community
  • 1
Oddthinking
  • 140,378
  • 46
  • 548
  • 638
  • 12
    A related question **on meta** deals with some problems this causes: [How should we deal with claims that only appear in article headlines?](https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4074/how-should-we-deal-with-claims-that-only-appear-in-article-headlines) – Oddthinking Dec 20 '17 at 14:12
  • 32
    As a former newspaper reporter (and later online editor), I concur. Writing headlines, especially to fit available space, is a different skill from writing stories. As a print reporter, you wouldn't even know whether you story would have a main head and a subhead, or what size either would be. (Though newer pagination systems may show you once a story is assigned to a page design.) And for the web, you have to know search engine optimization. Also, it's possible for stories -- or just lead paragraphs -- to be rewritten without the writer's involvement. – jeffronicus Dec 20 '17 at 16:03
  • The final bullet point makes note of reporters writing "draft headlines". This is likely the case for most outlets whose reporters include a headline for their story. The final editor can still modify it prior to publication. – Michael Richardson Dec 20 '17 at 18:11
  • 1
    @MichaelRichardson Is your comment based on evidence? If so, can you explain how you know what you know? – Christian Dec 20 '17 at 20:30
  • 1
    @Christian what Michael writes matches my own limited personal experience, and matches my discussions with journalists: we suggest a headline, but then the sub-ed or whoever is responsible for headline-writing will do what they like (and in my case, will always ignore what I suggest!) – 410 gone Dec 21 '17 at 09:44
  • The cited sources are a bit fuzzy in terms of quantity. What means often? It seems there is a lack of publicly available inside information into the journalism business to really answer this question without doubt, even though it's plausible that the claim is true. Maybe newspapers should provide authorship information for the headlines too and not only the articles. – NoDataDumpNoContribution Dec 22 '17 at 11:49
  • 4
    @Trilarion: The word "often" is vague, but that's what the claim says. The context is always going to be important too. (Headlines on blog articles are normally written by the author.) I thought by showing that it was true at many major newspapers, it should be sufficient to see it is common enough to be a consideration when attributing credit/blame for headlines. – Oddthinking Dec 22 '17 at 13:16
  • 1
    I would imagine that local papers that run stories from national feeds might also rewrite headlines in order to fit the layout and/or to emphasize a local connection. This results in the same (or substantially similar) stories running under multiple different headlines. – Adrian McCarthy Dec 22 '17 at 17:20
  • @Oddthinking You think this would be sufficient, others may interpret it different and may come to a different conclusion, maybe even coming from the same sources. I guess the problem is that we don't really know what these people mean when they say "often" but here we want to say something that is objectively true. Fuzzy statements may or may not be true. It's not a criticism really. Answerers here do their best. It's just an acknowledgment of a problem. – NoDataDumpNoContribution Dec 22 '17 at 20:59