From the newsroom: Here’s some headline news

For their study, the authors analyzed audience engagement with more than 31,000 articles. Each of the articles was presented using at least two different headlines, a practice that corporate marketing departments call A/B testing.

“Headlines with more common words — simple words like ‘job’ instead of ‘occupation’ — shorter headlines, and those communicated in a narrative style, with more pronouns compared with prepositions, received more clicks,” according to the authors.

Here’s an example they cited from The Washington Post: “Meghan and Harry are talking to Oprah. Here’s why they shouldn’t say too much” outperformed the alternative, “Are Meghan and Harry spilling royal tea to Oprah? Don’t bet on it.”

Digging deeper, they found that the simple language is what attracts readers to headlines, and thus to stories. This all seems like common sense, but there’s a problem: Editors who write the headlines don’t always buy into it.

Those of us who grew up in the print era were taught to write headlines that were clever and unusual. Puns were encouraged, like the use of “royal tea” rather than “royalty” in one of the Meghan and Harry examples above.

The authors of the study suggest ditching the puns and remembering the old acronym “KISS,” which they modified a little bit to mean “Keep it simple, staffers!”

Checking local headlines

With this in mind, on Monday I went looking at headlines on some local news sites. It didn’t take me long to find this stinker over on oregonlive.com: “How Oregon commits fared in high school football this week: Dakorien Moore chucking deuces.” What does this even mean? (You didn’t think I was going to cite any bad examples from our website, did you?)

Using the above guidelines, a better headline might have been “Future Oregon football players show their skills as high school season starts.”

To be fair I also saw some oregonlive.com headlines I liked. Here’s a good one: “Value of rare Tiffany sterling piece, in a Portland closet for 4 generations, stuns owners.” This clear headline conveys a sense of mystery and sets an edge that make readers want to click.

The Columbian’s copy desk had a conversation about web headlines a year or so ago. Web Editor Amy Libby encouraged us to write longer headlines that provide more hooks to internet search engines, a phenomenon that is known as SEO, or search engine optimization. She pointed out that print headlines often are poor at SEO. That’s OK, because in print they appear alongside subheads, photos and graphics that give readers more context.

I think Amy was a little frustrated with our slow progress at first, but our online headlines have steadily improved. Luckily, Amy’s guidance seems to fit pretty well with this new academic study.

Headlines always need to be fair and accurate. But simplicity is important, too. Journalists need to remember that readers are busy, and will appreciate a simple explanation of what they’ll get when they click on a story.