On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If you only have one shot at writing a headline, there's a lot of pressure.
People often think that reporters write their own headlines. In fact, they almost never do. The people who do write headlines are the copy editors who are the front and last lines of quality-checking in a newspaper before it goes to print.
Headlines are so great in a sense that they can take a little bit from an article completely out of context and blow it into something it's not. Some people really only read headlines.
I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way when I move my characters through it, I know.
It is grievous to read the papers in most respects, I agree. More and more I skim the headlines only, for one can be sure what is carried beneath them quite automatically, if one has long been a reader of the press journalism.
Headline writing is an art form.
In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.
I don't read as much as people may expect. In fact, sometimes I feel that I should probably read more, but then I do believe that one of the big problems of our times is that there's too much reading and not enough thinking.
Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
People read stuff over your shoulder when you're in public, and when you write the kind of stuff I do, and people read it over your shoulder, it makes you a little self-conscious.
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