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Writing Headlines for Robots
Please note: I do not hold the copyright on this text. It was authored by a Globe and Mail writer; posted on the Globe and Mail blog “In Other Words” and subsequently removed from the site on Tursday Oct 15, 2009. If the writer or powers-that-be at the Globe do not believe this is fair dealing with the material; I can be reached at ian@mediastyle.ca
This isn't about books. But it is about words.Last week, our headline on the review for Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist was one ofthose sweetly goofy and slightly shopworn plays on words that newspapers are rightlyfamous and infamous for. The book is about a self-doubting poet in midlife crisis mulling(and procrastinating) over an essay about rhyme; the headline was "The marinating ofthe ancient rhymer."I'm not going to explain that headline to anyone, because there is no point. We in theBooks section had a good laugh about it. It's the kind of fun you can get away with at anewspaper, and we went about our self-congratulatory way all pleased with ourselves.Our merriment came to a screeching halt on Tuesday after I went to a seminar onsearch engine optimization and discovered that it was actually a really really crappyheadline. I learned that this kind of badinage, so peculiar to newspapers, has no placeon the Internet. The reason is both simple and deranged: The most important reader ofInternet news headlines is not you, the sentient, curious human being, but the robots atGoogle that scan headlines and return search results based on what their cold, lifelesseyes tell them.Thus, "The marinating of the ancient rhymer," when processed through a search engine,would not be of any use to a person searching online for stories about, or reviews of,The Anthologist. The idiot search engine would ignore the Globe's review altogether,although it would immediately send the story to anyone who wanted to know how totenderize an ancient rhymer. Our cute headline might have amused us and a fewreaders, but it potentially cost us a bunch of hits on our website, and that is all thatmatters.We were taught at the seminar that particular rules apply to writing good Internetheadlines: Use the full name, never just the last name, for example. And always thinklike a person searching for your story in Google. Ask yourself, What would you type in ifyou were the one doing the searching?Above all, we were taught that Internet headlines have to be written with a certain kindof hipster doofus in mind. This person was embodied by the groovy, ever-pacing journalism professor who led the class on writing for robots (he didn't call it that), and
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