http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/12/09/monkey.smuggling/index.html
Woman "pregnant" with Monkey is convicted:
This misleading headline is just another example of how journalists trick people into reading their stories. The woman mentioned was not pregnant with a monkey (I thought maybe there was some type of illegal transplant deal going on) but instead hid a monkey under her shirt and tried to smuggle it. There are a million other ways to say this - "Woman caught smuggling rare monkey out of Thailand" or something like that. That way, the reader knows what they are going to read about. These mystery headlines only lead to dissappointment.
AOL is the main culprit of it, as I've had too many experiences where I read an interesting headline, and the story following has nothing to do with it. I imagine there must be other people out there who feel tricked after clicking a seemingly interesting headline, only to find a boring story at its end. Still, this highlights the daunting task we as journalists have: keeping people interested. I personally think it is a cop-out to use the headline to say something that may not really be what the article is about. This pulls the readers in, for sure, but in the end what has the journalist achieved? They got people to waste a couple of seconds reading their headline and the first paragraph of their article before realizing the truth: the article really isn't that interesting.
I personally try to find more interesting article topics to write about so that I don't bore myself, let alone others. As for my headlines, I'm a fan of the creative and catchy ones, but sometimes it is more important to alert readers to what you wrote about, specifically if your article is more serious. The article is immediately read as a joke when the headline is treated as one. In the case of this monkey article, I tried to read it as someone who would find this topic vitally intersting, and realized that if I were overly-concerned with illegal animal smuggling into the United States or something like that, I wouldn't even read this article, thinking it was about something else.
In short, with headlines you should be less confusing, more informative. Either way you can still be creative.
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2 comments:
Wow, I totally agree. When i saw the headline i thought this article was going to be really good, and have an interesting topic of this woman pregnant with a monkey. But this title was extremely irrelevant and unnecessary. This journalist needs to learn how to make better headlines that include his/her writing. But on the other hand, maybe the headline is a silent joke i am missing, which could be the case.
I can't tell you how many times I have also clicked on article headers and found the article to be nothing like what was introduced in the headline. You mentioned that AOL seems to be the main culprit of this and I agree that I see it much more online that I do in physical newspapers.
I also agree that using a misleading headline is not the right solution, even if it does draw readers in. Personally, I think all it will end up doing is frusterating the reader. And that's a good point that you made about people who would genuinely be interested in the actual topic not reading it because the article was misrepresented by the author.
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