Skip to main content

Thinking about Headlines


There are different ways to do headlines, adopting by different journalistic organizations.

The front page for the Wall Street Journal had the following headline on p.1, on Nov. 22, "Disney Executives Told Board They Lost Faith in Ousted CEO."  Note that every word there is capitalized except for a preposition, "in". Note also, as is common, that the headline is a full grammatical sentence in the present tense. 

This is a form of what is known as an "Up style" of headline typography. 

A more drastic Up style is one in which EVERY LETTER IS UPPER CASE. This is generally used only for very short and dramatic headlines. ARMSTRONG ON MOON.  Headlines suitable for all caps treatment at generally not sentences. They are phrases or sometimes single words. 

But there is also a Down style, typified by the usage of The Guardian, a distinguished London publication. A Guardian headline might read, "China fury at broader US inquiry into Covid.' (See col. one, in the image above.) Note the difference.  Not only different from the drastic moon-landing all-caps style, but different from the Wall Street Journal style cited above. 

Setting aside the initials "US," only two actual words are capitalized. The first word of the first sentence (both the name of a country and the word "Covid," with its totemic significance over recent years. Look at the other examples on the front page displayed above. Normal sentence, in bold face and larger print that the text below them, but not screaming for our attention.  

Down styles are emotionally lower-key than up styles. Up styles are supposed to command your attention. Down styles make their own appeal. "We know, dear reader, that you are serious about learning the news and don't need for us to shout at you."

Sort of like Steve Perry versus Sting, to revert to a question from last week! STEVE PERRY versus Sting.  


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more