•February 9, 2022•
By Jim Baumann
NP Guest Writer

A pair of letter writers this week reminded me that not everyone on this planet was trained to write headlines.
Hollywood, which rarely offers an accurate portrayal of a newsroom, doesn’t know how headlines work, either.
In movies, you’ll see complete sentences in heavy bold type that half fill a front page of a prop newspaper. I understand that in prop papers there is only one headline on the page that helps propel the plot, but to make “FINGERPRINTS FROM THE ESTRANGED WIDOW OF WEALTHY INDUSTRIALIST SILAS MCGREEDY ARE FOUND ON A SERRATED BREAD KNIFE” a 120-point headline is rather silly.
Space is precious. That’s just isn’t how it works in the real world.
I’ve mentioned before that in headlines we almost never use complete sentences, unless they are downsized secondary headlines. We abbreviate our thoughts and drop articles, punctuation and verbs with élan.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.