I Love Headlines
I love headlines.
I did all the nerdy UIL journalism competitions in school, but headline writing was always my favorite. I flip to NBC on Monday nights so that I can catch Jay Leno’s Headlines segment. I love the idea of condensing an entire story into a short, preferably pithy statement.
One of my favorite TV shows, Parks and Recreation, loves to play around with headlines. In one episode, the Pawnee city manager has a heart attack while standing next to Parks Department Deputy Director Leslie Knope. He reaches for support and, unfortunately, his hand lands on her chest. The next day, the Pawnee Sun runs this headline:
Leslie loves offering potential headlines to reporter Shauna Malway-Tweep.
When Pawnee buries a time capsule, she proposes, “It’s time to en-capsule-ate the future. Sub headline: The parks department cuts the crapsule, buries the time capsule.”
When the Parks Department sponsors a Harvest Festival, she suggests not only a headline, but a story lead-in as well: “This just in: Harvest Festival? More like Harvest Bestival! The Parks Department has planted the seeds, and now they’re harvesting the rewards. …They’ll put the fun in funnel cake!”
But the best Parks and Rec headline has to be the one from budget advisor Ben Wyatt’s past. When he was 18, he was elected mayor of his small Minnesota town. Being- you know- 18, he blew all of the town’s money on a winter sports complex called Ice Town. He was promptly impeached, and the next day the headlines read, “Ice Town Costs Ice Clown His Town Crown,” which may be the single greatest headline of all time.
My hometown Wichita Falls often reminds me of the fictional town of Pawnee. It’s small and sometimes a little pathetic, but overall it’s inexplicably charming. And, like Pawnee, the headlines in Wichita Falls make me laugh. I should have saved the expose on the suffering of a local groundhog colony and the bizarre, vaguely suggestive article about nuns. But as magnificent as those were, today’s front page story surpasses them by far.
It was the story of (pause for effect) a MURDER.
The story describes the killing- nay, the massacre- of countless innocents. It also reveals that the murderer cannot be stopped, and authorities have decided that the slaughter must simply “run its course.” The two accompanying photos shed light on the horrific tragedy. The first shows the bodies of two victims washed up on shore, eyes and mouths gaping. The second photo is of a specialist examining the catastrophic scene. The top headline makes a film reference, and the subhead names the suspected killer.
I hope you can imagine this article. Mind you, it takes up the middle 40% of the Times Record News front page.
This is the picture of the specialist:
And this picture shows the bloated corpses of two of the victims:
This is the subhead naming the killer:
And the coup de grâce, the film reference headline:
That’s right, golden algae is killing the fish in Lake Wichita. Now, the death of blameless “crappie, shad, and largemouth bass” is no laughing matter. What is a laughing matter is the gravity with which the TRN presented the tale, and the space that they allowed it. The Dow Jones jumped 180 points, three inmates escaped from a local jail, and the superintendent of the struggling WFISD introduced a progressive financial initiative, but the largest story besides the Iowa caucus is about the unpreventable death of some local fish. I guess it just goes to show you that what is trivial to one person may be front page material to another.
By the way, I have no doubt that this would make the front page in Pawnee, but it would definitely be under a headline that rhymed. Maybe “Bass’s Last Gasp: Plenty Crossed by Moss, Twenty Lives Lost,” or “Conned by Pond Frond: Scads of Sad Shad Go Bad,” or “Unhappy Crappie Caught in Trap-py: Water Plant is Slaughter Plant.”
Like I said… I love headlines.