How to write perfect News Headlines

Writing news headlines in an art, the purpose of writing headlines is to grab the attention of your reader. A headline usually is a phrase which summarizes the story and yet is different from the lead paragraph. The focus while writing a headline should be on the main point of the story and hence headlines give a reader the gist of the story. It is the headline which entices a reader to read a story. No matter how good your news story is a reader will only read your story if he finds the headline to be interesting.

• Writing headlines

Writing headlines as said earlier is an art. It is the duty of a sub-editor to give a story an attractive headline. Following are the guidelines to be followed while writing a headline.

1. Should be accurate: A headline should do justice to the meaning and the tone of the news story. Often you might have noticed many misleading headlines especially on the online platform. Writing misleading headlines to sensationalize a trivial matter is not good journalism practice.

2. Should be concise: Shorter the headline the better it is. In print people often stick to short and sharp headlines due to space constraints. But on the online platform where space is not a problem people tends to give lengthy headlines which is not advisable.

3. Should fill the space: In order to avoid too much of free space (which is called the white space) the person writing headline is require to fill the space as much as he could.

4. Should not be abstract: The purpose of writing a headline to convey the meaning of the story effectively. So writing a straightforward, direct headline is always better that writing abstract, confusing headlines.

5. Should be written in present tense: While news stories are written mostly in the simple past tense the headlines RE written mostly in the present tense. 

For example : ‘Trump hosts dinner for Modi’ (Present tense)

Washington: Ahead of their Summit talks, US President Barack Obama on Monday hosted a private dinner for Prime Minister NarendraModi as the two leaders sought to reinvigorate bilateral ties. (Past tense)

6. Should use active voice: Using active voice will help you to communicate more information with lesser number of words. In active voice subject performs the action described by the verb. 

For example: Modi (Subject) visits (Verb) Canada

7. Avoid repeating the lead: Both the headline and the lead should focus on the main point of the story. If you are using same words both in the headline and the lead then the lead will become needless. Hence it is better to different words in headline and lead.

8. Avoid bad breaks: A bad break is when a headline with more than one line splits an adjective, noun verb, adverb or a prepositional phrase. 

For example look at the headline below:

Trump hosts white

house dinner

Here the phrase white house should not be split to the second line. In this case a better headline would be:

Trump hosts dinner

at the white house