What a Headline Owes the Reader

A headline is usually the only part of a piece a reader sees before they decide whether to spend the next four minutes with it. That gives it an outsized job: state what the piece establishes, clearly enough that the decision to read on is an informed one. When we sit down with reporters to look at headlines, the most common issue isn't a lack of skill — it's a small, understandable drift between the headline's claim and the article's actual finding.

That drift usually happens for a reasonable reason. A headline gets written before the final edit, when the piece was still shaping up to say something slightly stronger than what the reporting ultimately supported. Or it gets written under time pressure, borrowing the punchiest sentence from the draft without checking whether that sentence still represents the whole piece once the edit is finished. Neither is a failure of honesty. Both are worth catching before publication.

The standfirst is not a second headline

A standfirst — the line beneath a headline that expands on it — has one job the headline can't do: add something. Too often it repeats the headline in slightly different words, which wastes the one line most likely to hold a hesitant reader's attention a moment longer. A standfirst earns its place by telling the reader something specific the headline couldn't fit: a number, a name, a location, a timeframe.

• ■Read the headline and standfirst together, as a reader would, and ask what new information the second line adds.
• ■If the standfirst could be deleted without losing meaning, it isn't doing its job yet.
• ■Specific details outperform vague intensifiers — a date beats "recently," a figure beats "many."

Headlines travel further than the article does

Once a piece is shared, the headline frequently travels alone — reposted, screenshotted, quoted in a message thread — separated entirely from the paragraphs that qualify or contextualize it. A headline that relied on that surrounding context to be accurate becomes misleading the moment it's read on its own. Testing a headline against that scenario, imagining it appearing with nothing else attached, catches problems that reading it in place on the page won't.

None of this argues for dull headlines. A headline can be sharp, specific, and genuinely interesting while still being exactly as strong as the reporting underneath it. That's the standard worth writing toward — not the most attention-grabbing version available, but the most accurate version that still earns the click.