Lesson 08 · 4 min · 6 things to do
The headline is the product
You scroll a feed for three minutes and come away knowing what happened today. You opened nothing.
A story's headline says one thing. Its ninth paragraph complicates it. Which one reaches more people?
- Yes.Most people who meet a story never open it, and most who open it leave within seconds. The headline is not an advertisement for the story; for most of the audience it is the story.
- Not quite.People who care do read it, and they are a small share of everyone who saw it. The rest still came away with something.
- Not quite.Pictures carry a lot. But the sentence is the part that gets repeated, shared and argued with, because it is the part you can quote.
Of every 100 news links shared on social media, how many had been opened by the person sharing them?
Commit to one. Nothing is scored — this is here so you have a number in your head before you see the real one.
41 of 100 · Opened before being shared
Out of 100 news links shared on social media. About 40.The exact figure is 41. Researchers matched shared links against clicks and found 59 in 100 had never been opened by the person passing them on. For them the headline was not a summary of what they read. It was what they read.So a headline is not a door into the story. For most of the people who meet it, it is the whole building.
And of the people who do click through to a page, how many spend less than fifteen seconds on it?
Commit to one. Nothing is scored — this is here so you have a number in your head before you see the real one.
About 55 in 100.Measured across two billion visits in a single month. Clicking is not reading. More than half the people who arrive have gone again before the second paragraph.One story with twelve separate facts in it — a made-up story, a real shape. Move the control to see how many survive at each length.
1 of 12 · Facts that survive
A headlineEight words. One fact, and it has to be the most striking one.
3 of 12 · Facts that survive
A feed summaryTwenty-five words. Three facts, and a short qualifier if it is very short.
6 of 12 · Facts that survive
The first paragraphsA hundred and twenty words. Six facts. The disagreement about the figure appears here for the first time.
12 of 12 · Facts that survive
The whole articleSeven hundred words. All twelve, including the one that makes the headline less certain.
Where in that list does the fact that complicates the headline usually sit?
- Yes.A qualification is a sentence about how much to trust another sentence, and it never fits into eight words. So it always lands in the part most people never reach.
- Not quite.Its position is set by length, not by topic. Whatever the subject, the caveat is the longest thing to say and so it goes last.
- Not quite.Reporters do put the striking thing first, and a qualification is not striking. Important and striking are two different orderings, and the second one wins.
Move the control to see what changes.
All six of these headlines could sit over the same article. What is each one actually reporting?
"Water levels rose two metres overnight"
"Flood defences failed, report finds"
"Minister denies flood defences failed"
"Council accused of ignoring warnings"
"Flooding could hit thousands more homes"
"Experts fear a repeat next winter"
Yes.The first pair report an event. The second pair report that somebody spoke. The last pair report nothing that has happened at all — and in a feed, all six look and feel exactly the same.You remember a fact but not where you got it. What did you most likely actually see?
- Not quite.It happens, and reading an article usually leaves more behind — a detail, an image, an argument you disagreed with. A bare fact with nothing around it arrived alone.
- Yes.That is the commonest way anything reaches anybody now. It arrives with no article attached and no source to remember, because there never was one attached.
- Not quite.Often true, and it moves the question one step back. They most likely met it as a headline too, since most shared links are never opened.
Lesson complete
Most of a story's audience only ever meets its headline.
Next: Reading the silence →