After scrolling through this post, you may wonder what on earth the journalists, writers, and content creators were thinking to come up with such absurd headlines. Some of them are surely made out of pure bluntness, but others… they make you wonder. So in order to find out more about the art of headline making, we spoke to Lina Survila, an editor in chief of “Abstract Stylist” online magazine who has years of experience of working in press.
Lina started off by saying that getting your headline clicked is hard work. “Unfortunately, editors are often pressured to bring better results with each article, so headline wars have become the real deal today."
It turns out that there's a fine line between an informative headline and a fake one, Lina argues. “First, we all need to know that headlines play a big role in Google's ranking magic. Every editor has a wish for their article to reach the top position, meaning more clicks if a user is often searching for it.”
“So because an editor wants to reach more people, they end up using trendy keywords which result in misleading headlines,” Lina explained and added that it happens more often than you’d think.
Meanwhile, the news headlines sometimes “sound a little harsh sometimes, as they're spoiling all articles for everyone. But poetic, beautiful headlines often don't capture the essence of the text, so people who are used to reading their news fast don't take time to appreciate it or click to see if this article is something in their interest.”
The problem is that nowadays, anything can be called news, according to Lina. “An elephant giving birth is news, a funny story about a chicken is news. It gets people's attention. You can’t blame them. If this is the content they read and actually click on it, editors will have to produce more of it.”
However, fake news is something that should be taken more seriously. Lina explained that “clickbait headlines often mislead people, and those who do not bother to open the article might mislead other people too by spreading the wrong message. For example, recently, I read that K. Reaves is married to Winona Ryder, well, it was stated in the headline, and actually, they were married in the movie.” Lina said it’s a good example of how misleading a headline can be, and in fact she would call it a case of “fake news.”
