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1. What a headline promises
A headline is read by many more people than the article, and by some readers it is read instead of the article. That makes it a factual statement in its own right, not a marketing line attached to one. It must be supportable by the top of the story, it must attribute a contested claim, and it must not carry an implication the piece does not establish.
The dangerous headline is not the dull one but the one that is technically defensible and practically misleading. A headline that reports an allegation without signalling that it is an allegation asserts the allegation. A headline that quotes one phrase from a long answer can invert the meaning of the answer. Both are the sort of complaint the Office of the Press Ombudsman considers under the Press Council of Ireland's code of practice, and both are avoidable at the writing stage.
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2. Counting, and writing to a space
Headlines are written to a budget. In print the budget is physical: a number of characters at a given size across a given measure. Online it is functional: a length that survives truncation in a list, a search result and a social preview. Either way, the discipline is the same. Write the headline to the space rather than writing it long and hoping somebody else will cut it.
Practical technique: draft five headlines, not one. Write the first as a plain statement of the top line, the second shorter, the third as a question you then discard, the fourth using the story's strongest concrete noun, and the fifth using its strongest verb. The best headline is usually a hybrid of the second and the fifth. Count characters as you go, including spaces, because the count is the constraint that makes the choice.
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3. Verbs, dropped articles and ambiguity
Headline grammar is compressed: articles are often dropped, the present tense stands in for the recent past, and the verb carries the weight. The compression creates a specific hazard, because English words frequently work as both noun and verb. A headline that can be parsed two ways will be parsed the funnier way, and the resulting sentence, sometimes called a crash blossom, will outlive the story.
Two checks catch most of it. Read the headline aloud to somebody who has not read the article and ask them what it means. Then reread it deliberately looking for a second grammatical reading of the first three words. Avoid stacking modifiers, avoid abbreviations a general reader would not recognise, and never use a proper noun in a headline unless it is the reason the story exists.
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4. Search and social variants without clickbait
The same story often needs three headline forms: a display headline for the page, a plainer one for search and lists, and a short one for a preview card. Writing them separately is legitimate and useful, because each is read in a different context. What is not legitimate is writing a different claim in each, so that the version most likely to be shared is the one least supported by the text.
The line between a strong headline and a deceptive one is whether the reader who clicks finds what they were promised. Withholding the actual fact to force a click, implying a revelation the piece does not contain, and posing a question the article never answers all fail that test. A useful rule is that the promise made by every variant should be identical, even where the wording is not.
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5. The editing passes
Editing is not one activity. The structural pass asks whether the material is in the right order and whether anything essential is missing. The accuracy pass checks names, titles, dates, figures, quotations and internal consistency against the notes. The language pass removes padding, fixes tense and agreement and applies house style. The legal and ethical pass looks for meaning that could harm somebody unjustly, and for balance and reply.
Run them in that order, because language polish on a paragraph that will be cut is wasted work, and a legal read of an unstable structure has to be repeated. Between passes, do something else for a few minutes; the recovery of unfamiliarity is what makes the next pass useful. Print or change the type size if you can, since the eye skips errors it has already skipped in the same layout.
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6. House style and why consistency matters
A style guide settles the questions that have no correct answer: whether dates are written with or without an ordinal, when numerals replace words, how job titles are capitalised, which abbreviations are allowed at first mention, how measurements and percentages are set. None of these choices is right, but inconsistency within one page is visible to readers and reads as carelessness.
Style also encodes fairness decisions, which is the part that matters most. How a person's own description of themselves is used, when an age or a nationality is relevant, whether an address is published, how a place name is rendered: these are editorial judgements that should be made once, written down, and applied consistently rather than improvised story by story.
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7. Wording a correction
A correction states what was wrong, what is right, and where the error appeared. It does not blame the reader for misunderstanding, does not hide behind the passive voice, and does not repeat the error more prominently than the fix. Where a headline was wrong, the correction has to address the headline, because that is what most readers saw.
Place and date it. A correction appended silently to an updated page is not a correction to the readers who saw the earlier version; an update note with a timestamp is the minimum. Distinguish four things in your own log: a typographical fix, a clarification that changes emphasis, a correction that changes a fact, and a retraction that withdraws a claim. Readers can complain to the Office of the Press Ombudsman about member publications, but the first and fastest route is always the publisher's own.
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8. Sign-off responsibility
Somebody must be answerable for the published version, and it should be clear before publication who that is. In small operations the writer and the editor are the same person, which makes an external check more important rather than less: a second reader who has not seen the draft will find the ambiguity you have stopped noticing.
The sign-off question is not only legal. It covers whether the right of reply was sought and represented fairly, whether the images and captions match the text, whether the furniture over-claims, and whether anything in the piece identifies a person it was not meant to identify. Record who signed off and when. That record costs one line and answers most of the questions a later complaint will raise.
Page furniture and what each element does
| Element | Job | Usual length | Failure mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Headline | State the news and make one promise | Four to twelve words | Claims more than the top of the story supports |
| Standfirst | Set up the piece and name its scope | Twenty to forty words | Repeats the headline instead of extending it |
| Sub-deck | Add the second fact the headline could not hold | Six to fifteen words | Contradicts the headline's emphasis |
| Caption | Say who, what, where and when in the image | Fifteen to thirty words | Written at the desk from memory and wrong |
| Pull quote | Signal the voice of the piece | Up to fifteen words | Quotes out of context and changes the meaning |
Checklist before sign-off
- Headline supportable by the first three paragraphs, with contested claims attributed.
- All furniture read together for contradictions in emphasis.
- Second grammatical reading of the headline deliberately looked for.
- Four passes run in order: structure, accuracy, language, legal and ethical.
- Names, titles, figures and quotations checked against the notes, not from memory.
- Captions checked against the images and the text, and dated.
- Sign-off recorded with a name or role and a time.
Questions readers ask
Can a headline be inaccurate if the article is right?
Yes, and it is one of the most common grounds of complaint. A headline is read by people who never reach the article, so it must be supportable on its own.
Is a different headline for search or social acceptable?
Yes, provided every variant makes the same promise. Different wording is normal practice; a different claim is not.
Where should a correction appear?
Where the error was seen, dated and specific about what changed. If the error was in the headline, the correction has to address the headline.