This headline has 13 words. How much did you expect it to say?

LAST month, a clarification appeared in the pages of The Straits Times for an article with the headline: “Fall in motorcycle COE prices shows market working as intended: Iswaran”.

The headline had paraphrased a comment made by Transport Minister S Iswaran in the context of a recent fall in certificate of entitlement prices.

Except, Iswaran wanted it on record that he had not used the word “fall”. Instead, he had used the word “correction”.

As news editor of The Business Times (BT), I have received similar requests.

Complaints tend to be some variant of the following:

• The story tells the whole picture, but the headline does not
• The headline focuses on losses, even though revenue touched a record high
• There were many investors in the funding round, but only one in the headline
• The company’s name is not spelled in full

Newsmakers worry that many readers only read headlines. Understandably, newsmakers want headlines that meet their objectives.

This challenge of balancing completeness and brevity feels, at times, impossible.

I venture that no item of communication is expected to do as much as the media headline.

Consider an advertisement for a special deal: It is sufficient to carry an asterisk and a footnote, saying terms and conditions apply. The consumer is expected to dig these up, as difficult as they may be to find.

In an e-mail, a subject line is frequently designed to catch attention. I occasionally send e-mails to reporters with the subject line “Important: Please do not delete”. There is no expectation that I must summarise my entire email.

Why, then, must headlines accomplish so much?

What are headlines for?

I asked reporters in the BT newsroom who graduated from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, part of the Nanyang Technological University, what they learned about headlines.

One shared some notes from a lecture, advising that a headline should carry key information (what, why, how or when) while promising something interesting.

Another said she learnt to pack in as much important information from the story as possible.

A third said the headline was a hook: “It’s the thing that the newspaper boy standing at the street corner shouts, to get people to buy his papers.”

As a journalism graduate myself, I also recall learning the importance of being concise: Never use three words if one will do; a short, simple word is better than a long, sophisticated one.

These rules used to apply to headline writing in particular, because newspapers do not have space for long headlines and because short ones look better.

Put all this together, and you will see why headline writing is one of the highest art forms in journalism. Some of my senior colleagues have become so good at this, you can tell immediately if a headline was written by them.

Headline generation

Undoubtedly, though, the newsmakers are right about one thing. Some readers only read headlines.

News consumption today means scrolling through social media feeds that show a headline, picture, and maybe the first few words of a story. Readers click only if something catches their attention.

This behaviour incentivises what the industry calls clickbait journalism – headlines designed not to summarise or even inform, but to seduce.

Audiences supposedly dislike this.

A study of how 100 individuals responded to news over Facebook, WhatsApp and Google found interviewees critical of headlines that were too sensational or provocative. Another study found that clickbait hurt source credibility.

On the other hand, a third study found that soft news, sensational news and news about celebrities are more likely to be shared on social media.

In a fourth study, rewriting headlines to include “clickbait features” led to a statistically significant increase in the number of clicks.

Kate Scott, an academic at Kingston University in the United Kingdom, theorised in a paper that headlines which create an information gap prod audiences to fill that gap by clicking through.

BT tries to avoid headlines that might fall into the clickbait category, even though it might cost us page views.

We do, however, test some of our headlines to figure out what works best. Big brands or names tend to play well, regardless of the type of news. Specifics are preferred over generalities. Bad news over good.

Unfortunately, some of the principles that attract readers will offend newsmakers.

This is an issue newsrooms around the world struggle with.

At a virtual roundtable hosted by the Reuters Institute of Journalism, editors “voiced concern that the type of news content most likely to garner trust with audiences was often distinct from the stories that platforms rewarded and incentivised with interactions and attention”.

Taneth Evans, associate editor of The Sunday Times, said the tendency of readers to only look at headlines has caused the paper to think more carefully about how a headline would look if people do not read the article. “But that’s not good,” she said. “We’re not in the business of writing headlines only, without articles to go with them. So that’s a real issue for us, and I don’t know what the answer is.”

I am in agreement with Evans. And I, too, am still struggling with the answer.