How to write headlines for the Web rather than for print

Writing good headlines for the Web is very different to writing good headlines for print (newspapers, magazines and so on). But why?

Web headlines might appear in a news ticker, on the site's front page or news index, or even on another site entirely (through syndication, perhaps, as shown below). That means they have to make sense in their own right, without being dependent on any image or accompanying copy.

This isn't the case with print headlines. A classic (if controversial) UK newspaper headline is The Sun's 'Gotcha', which celebrated the torpedoing of an Argentine ship during the Falklands War:

This is a great print headline - but only makes sense when seen in context, with the accompanying standfirst (introductory paragraph) and images. So it would make a terrible Web headline.

Another consequence of Web headlines appearing out of context is that it sometimes makes it impossible to avoid accidental juxtapositions. But if you can't avoid them, you can't worry about them.

The magazine I work for addresses a particular business sector and I'm confident that almost all of its readers either work in or know a lot about that sector. Our website addresses the same business sector but its stories are often read by people outside that sector - many of whom come to them through search engines.

This means that some esoteric or technical terms may be suitable for print headlines but best avoided for Web headlines. The editor of the Web publication should give guidance on the degree to which stories and headlines should be targeted at the core audience, and the degree to which they should be accessible to all possible readers.

In addition, our magazine's readership is almost entirely UK-based, whereas the website's is much more international. For Web headlines, I try to avoid specifically British English terms that might not be readily understood by English speakers from other parts of the world.

For example, the word 'slated' in British English usually means 'criticised', but in American English, I believe, it more often means 'planned' or scheduled'. So I would avoid headlines such as this one:

On the magazine I work for, the layout of a particular page may leave me with room for only a four, three or even two-word headline. On our website, conversely, every headline has a 50-character limit - and that's only to stop headlines busting on to a second deck in our news ticker.

This lack of space constraints online means it is easier for writers to provide headlines for their own stories. On a print publication, there's little point in a writer supplying an eight-word headline if it is later going to emerge that there's only room for a three-word headline. On a Web publication with a fixed maximum headline length (or no maximum at all), this isn't a problem.

But all this doesn't necessarily make Web headlines easier to write than print headlines; the greater space constraints of print can be a spur to creativity.