I seem to recall that they are written by the local papers that use the stories. Makes sense since they have to fit the local paper’s layout.
Does the news service provide a list of suggested or acceptable headlines? I’d be surprised if they allowed the paper to put anything at all that they want on top of their story.
This question stems from the headline of an AP story on the top of the front page of my morning paper re the AZ shooting… Shooting rocks U.S. politics
My bro works for a news agency (French, though, so maybe it differs in the US), I have read some of his pieces, I dont recall ever seeing any title or headline.
Generally the stories come over with a quick slug, a quick title local editors can skim to see if they want to read the story.
It’s certainly possible to use/adjust that title to be the headline in print, but ultimately it’s the newspaper staff who either chooses to manipulate that or write something of their own.
Bottom line, if you don’t like the headline blame your local paper’s staff.
When I was able to see the news feed, there was a line that indicated the key elements of the story. A rough example would be “Senate passes health care bill.” It would not be expected to be used as a headline, but rather as a way for the editor to look quickly at the line to decide if the story needed to be run.
The news organizations have no control whatsoever over the headlines local editors choose to use.
The proof of this is the dozens or hundreds of times you’ll find a pair of headlines like “Good News: Economy Goes Up” and “Bad News: Economy Goes Down” over the very same article in different papers. (Substitute poll results or presidential speech or congressional vote or any of a million things.) It’s a staple of newspaper humor. The Columbia Journalism Review has a humor page - it’s what Jay Leno [del]stole[/del] adapted Headlines from - and they’ve been running these pairs of headlines for 50 years.
I don’t understand the example given, though. Shooting Rocks U.S. Politics is the most generic, all-purpose title I can think of. Why would you single that one out?
Local papers write their own headlines. They also edit the articles, mostly for length. The wire services have no control over either.
In fact, I just fired off a note to my local editor, telling her I felt the headline she put on my story wasn’t accurate.
A few years ago, there was some Internet snickering over a Christian website that would automatically change any reference to the word “Gay” to “Homosexual”. That didn’t work when Tyson Gay became Tyson Homosexual during the Olympics
The current slang meaning of the term “rocks” - much beloved of young whippersnappers* - is quite hard to pin down but seems to mean something like “is highly effective with respect to”. As in “she was totally, like, rocking that outfit” or “snowboarder rocks new trick”. Reading the headline with that usage, it sounds a bit strange.
*(get off my lawn)
“Rocks” in that context means “shakes up,” or has a radical effect on.
As in “rocks the boat”.
Sure, I know that, I’m just saying how it could be read differently by some.
Or “The Cradle Will Rock”
It was the first story the paper ran after the incident. It seemed to me that they would first report the facts rather than make it about politics. Wouldn’t substituting “the Country” for “US Politics” be more all-purpose?
Couple other newspaper questions…
Do they pick up from the last issue they published and inform from that point on… or in a highly publicised (via TV or internet) story do they assume that their readers already know things they have never published?
Is the NYT news service the same as the AP ie feel free to edit the story and put whatever headline on it you want?
They may provide a headline, but they don’t provide guidelines about what is acceptable and what isn’t.
It’s usually easy to think up another headline for a news story and you rarely get an explanation for why one synonym is preferred to another. If the headline was written for an international audience, “the country” wouldn’t work. For that matter “the country” could also mean a rural area.
It’s common practice to go back and sum up the background in a story after the new developments have been explained. Sometimes a paper will cover a story for months or years and it’s a bad idea to assume your readers are familiar with an entire complicated subject. That doesn’t apply very much to the Giffords case, but it’s standard.
That’s how wire services work. They do reporting and give it to their subscribers, and the subscribers can pretty much do what they want with it. Maybe there are some more specific rules but that’s the general idea. A local paper in Wisconsin doesn’t have the resources to cover the shootings in Arizona or the war in Iraq, so they pay a wire service to handle it and choose the stories they feel are relevant to their local readership.