Attack of the 50-foot headline

We used to be disciplined about this. For headlines, the rule was three and three in mobile view – that is to say, three decks of headline and three decks of standfirst, and no more, when looking at a Tribune article on your phone.

That’s pretty tight, so I used to allow myself to go three and four or four and three (OK, sometimes even four and four).

But now look what’s happened.

The Audience department has started brightly saying things like “it’s sometimes worth going slightly longer on a headline to add a kicker that punches up the drama!”. And with just that brief exposure to SEO radiation, the town’s gone crazy and giant monstrosities have BROKEN LOOSE.

Some of these headlines are literally double the height of what we restricted ourselves to in the old days. The thinking used to be that you would want a reader to see the whole headline and the standfirst, at least, on the same screen, to engage them before their attention wandered. Now you have to scroll just to get to the end of the first element. Long headlines may be able to punch up the drama, but perhaps not if you can’t read to the end of them on anything smaller than an iPad.

And that’s before you even consider the issue of the view in desktop mode. Many fewer people read the site on a computer than on a phone these days, so the rule is “make it look good on mobile”, but the appearance on the big screen still matters. The way the Tribune system is set up, there’s a sweet spot at about the three-and-four length that comes out neatly as two-and-two on desktop. There isn’t a built-in length guide in our software, but after a while you get used to hitting it, and making sacrifices to avoid creating, say, an orphan on a third deck. Now it seems they want us to pack the furniture with all the interest as well as the search terms, and hang the look or the length.

If you have any involvement in online media, you soon learn that search engine optimisation goes in phases. Pure SEO is, when you think about it, an unusual job – in effect, analysing and guessing how a private company’s proprietary algorithm might be working. Being a professional Google-watcher has its tribulations: for example, it used to be thought 15 years ago that repeating search terms in the headline and the standfirst was the key to being seen. Then it was thought that the standfirst might matter less for visibility than the main caption, and so on.

However, as the SEO role has expanded into what is now called “Audience”, it has engaged more widely with social media and news aggregator services, and is becoming – somewhat to sub-editors’ chagrin – a general headline-critiquing service in which social impact and readability are judged alongside search-friendliness. The rules are changing, again, and as one’s age and inflexibility increases, the harder it is to keep up.

On the other hand though, who’s to say they aren’t right about this? Which is the most successful British newspaper website of them all? Mail Online. And how long are Mail Online headlines? Well, er …

Eight decks, with an orphan. In desktop view! As well as a four-deck standfirst. It makes us look like amateurs. It also tramples all over the idea of brevity as a virtue in journalism: but maybe brevity was only a virtue when there was limited space, in the days of print? This is long, rambling and takes a whole breath to read out loud, but it contains every single likely search term relating to the story, and there is no shortage of space on the internet. Maybe length is not the issue at all any more. Maybe online visibility is the only thing that matters?

As the holidays approach, Ten Minutes Past Deadline has thrown some presents in the boot and is joining the queues on the M25 for its short peri-festivus break. Happy Christmas to all, and see you in the new year.

Anglophone emergency

This blog usually has fun decoding the confusions of agenda and language that international anglophone news throws up – human “coyotes”, angry cassowaries chasing “blokes”, and so on. But this ambiguity is potentially more serious.

This summer, the US launched a new suicide prevention hotline number, 988. There have recently been technical problems with it that forced it offline for a period. For some reason in the past few days – perhaps as a result of this news – some British Twitter users started copy-pasting and retweeting boilerplate text to raise awareness of the number as if it were a service in the UK, even though, of course, it isn’t, and that number here connects to nothing.

988 is a new phone number that has gone live in the UK to help people in a mental health crisis. The line is dedicated for anyone in need of mental health assistance of any kind
please share #MentalHealthMatters #MentalHealthAwareness

— Thom Donnelly 🎭🎬 (@ThomJaymes) December 4, 2022

The confusion does seem to have spread,

It's alarming to see misinformation of that 988 number spread

As if a new UK suicide hotline was launched with zero pr/media coverage

Before sharing you should ask…

☑️Where has this information came from?

☑️How can I verify it's true

☑️How do I know it's factual

— Victoria Heaney (@Vvfabs) December 4, 2022

and to have reached the point where where Mind, the prominent British mental health charity, was deploying its social media team to refute it:

Hi Heather, 988 is America's mental health crisis hotline number, not UK. ^Eli

— Mind (@MindCharity) December 5, 2022

Now Joe McNally at Horny Handed Subs of Toil suggests that a news story on the Independent website in the UK about 988’s technical problems may have fuelled some of the confusion.

The Independent is not one of the British news organisations determined to break into the US market – it’s UK-focused – and yet this story that it published last week seems to be a straight Associated Press wire story for an American audience. The headline, the opening paragraphs and even the photo are identical to the original version on the AP site.

As McNally says in his post, “for obvious reasons, sharing false information about emergency mental health services has enormous potential to cause serious harm”. And he rightly points out that here,

“nobody thought to make it clear at any point in the copy that this is an American story. It mentions a US health agency and a US health official but it’s full of references to ‘national’ services and ‘the nation’ without ever once explicitly stating *what that nation is*”.

He also says that several British people linked to this article to defend the information they had shared, because it’s so ambiguous about location. Arriving at the story almost 48 hours late, and with the rebuttal effort in full swing, I can’t now find any tweets that explicitly do this (although it may have happened on other social media). But even without a social media kerfuffle, the potential for this article to confuse, when presented on a UK site without any context, is clear. (Look at the bald headline in the screenshot above, on a site belonging to a British newspaper with not much of an international profile. Where would you conclude this hotline service might be based?)

As you read it closely, you see clues: 911, which is mentioned as “the emergency line”, is of course not the UK’s emergency line. Britain has no “Department of Health and Human Services”. The number was out of service “for several hours Thursday”, not “several hours on Thursday”. “Counselors” is given with one L, not two. But these are things that an editor would notice, not necessarily a member of the public.

At the Tribune, we have a lookup table for crisis hotline numbers in our three markets – the UK, the US and Australia – and add them as footnotes to relevant stories according to which audience the piece is intended for. In the UK, the number we give is 116 123, for the Samaritans. But as we have discussed many times on the blog, content intended for one market has a way of leaking across the website and being found by readers abroad.

That’s why the Tribune’s audience and SEO team, despite their rapacious appetite for clicks and sensation, still insist on us making clear in every headline or standfirst which country the news we report is taking place in. A footnote at the end is all very well, but the word “American” in the Independent’s standfirst here would have killed off the confusion at source.

Observing from outside, the article gives every impression of having been auto-launched without editorial intervention. However, if you read it word for word against the version on the AP site, there are some differences. This paragraph appears in the AP version but not in the Indy version,

“Veterans who are looking to reach the helpline can call the Veterans Crisis Line directly at 877-267-6030. The outage is also affecting the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Disaster Distress Helpline.”

and this additional information appears at the end of the agency’s version too:

“In a statement on its website, the company said it is ‘experiencing an incident that is impacting production across numerous systems’ and is ‘working diligently to restore service.’”

It’s not entirely clear why this is so. If these are the interventions of an editor at the Indy, then it’s worrying that they made those emendations but not others that would have clarified the story fully. (Also, why would anyone delete the contractor’s statement at the end?) It is perhaps more likely that these are additions from a later write-through by AP reporters, and that the Indy fetched the story for its site before they were filed; obviously the AP’s own site will always have the fullest, latest version.

If the latter is the case, then the article would indeed seem to have published with minimal human intervention, which calls to mind the complaint voiced for years by the old Testy Copy Editors website: “Hundreds of newspapers run AP completely unedited!” If that was a problem in the old days of American print, then it must be even more so now that hundreds of websites – and not all of them in the US – are running AP unedited too.

h/t: Joe McNally

Animal instincts

Shot at by coyotes? As if those wild desert canines weren’t ugly enough already. How do they manage to pull the triggers?

Hang on, though – look at that capitalisation. The Mail’s ear for emphasis, unlike some of its tabloid rivals, is unerring, and if it thinks being shot at is the biggest thing in the headline – not “shot at BY COYOTES” – then all may not be as it seems. In fact, it emerges after you click on the link that the “coyotes” here are human: it’s an American term for the people-smugglers who operate on the US-Mexican border, as the standfirst begins to make clear.

It’s another classic anglosphere news moment – a usage completely unfamiliar in Britain finding its way straight on to the UK homepage via the New York newsroom (just as, at the time of writing, readers of the American homepage are being informed of a former British soap actress’s new hobby of pole dancing, no doubt with a mixture of intrigue and bafflement as to who she is).

Even on the Mail website, though, coyote in this sense is quite rare – a comparative Google search suggests that only about 1,100 articles using the word also contain the word “smuggler”, compared with the 10,000-plus pieces about actual coyotes, the cast of Coyote Ugly, coywolves (coyote-wolf hybrids) and even zombie coyotes (no, really! Well, OK, they’re unwell and prowling around during the day).

It would be interesting to know just how well understood that usage is even in the US away from the southern border states – especially since, a few years ago, it even seemed to confuse President Trump, who spoke in a speech of the need for a border wall to deter “chaos, crime, cartels and, believe it or not, coyotes”.

You’d have thought that “chaos, crime and cartels” would have adequately covered the activities of the human type of coyote without … ? Anyway, never mind. Although given that canine coyotes were already widespread across western north America at the time of European colonisation, a wall would only serve to keep them in, rather than out.

Going for bloke

It’s on the Mail’s UK homepage, but there’s something very Australian about this story, isn’t there? And the most uniquely Australian thing about it is not the cassowary (which is also indigenous to Papua New Guinea): it’s the presence of the word “blokes” in the headline.

The word is rarely heard in any context in the US, of course, and in the UK, although it’s common, you would never see it in straight news reporting like this. In Britain, it carries a strong overtone of randomness or inconsequentiality – “some bloke”; “that bloke over there”. It’s almost dismissive; it would invite you not to care much about the people to whom the news had happened.

In Australia, however, it means something quite different: the “Aussie bloke” is a national idea, a recognised type, familiar from cultural exports such as Crocodile Dundee. As the academic Andrea Waling puts it, a bloke is “white, straight, able-bodied, and good for a laugh. He is practical and good in a crisis, but generally laid back. He rejects individualism in favour of loyalty to his mates.” In this context, “bloke” is not a denigration but an invitation to identify with the protagonists and sympathise. They are good sorts, Everymen, authentic Australians: people just like you or me, and just as likely to be out of their depth when being chased by a 100lb bird with a blue face.

Up until now, this blog has been discussing these constant collisions of anglosphere news dialects as a three-way “clash of equals” involving British, American and Australian English, but now I’m starting to suspect it’s even more complicated than that. For example, this piece of copy appeared in the Tribune subs’ queue a couple of weeks ago:

Because the story had arrived from the Australian website on its way to the UK print edition, it had already been edited, and there in blue (ie, already deleted) was the word “dairies”. Dairies? It seemed wrong, obviously, but also such an unlikely mistake to make in the context of cigarette retailing. What could the writer have meant?

In fact, a bit of Googling revealed that it wasn’t a mistake at all: this story was filed to the Australian newsroom by our correspondent in New Zealand, where the term for a corner shop/7-11/convenience store is, indeed, a “dairy”. But this usage is not even understood in Australia, so the sub in Sydney had changed it, hours before the copy found its way to London. I did one or two bits of de-Australianising elsewhere for UK readers, but beneath that work there had already been a process of de-New Zealandising that would have been undetectable to anyone outside the Tribune.

This prompts the thought that beneath the “big three” flavours of anglosphere news English, there is also an overshadowed hierarchy of others. At the Tribune, in addition to New Zealand correspondents filing to Sydney, Canadian reporters file to New York and South African writers to London. What is happening to idioms and expressions common in these countries and present in copy, but processed at regional offices elsewhere before being published to the world? Presumably, as in this case, they are ending up on the spike. We have previously floated the idea of British, Australian and American news eventually merging into one, but, if it ever happens, it may have to wait until six or seven flavours of English have been flattened into three.

Made in Chelsea (Vic.)

Good arvo! No, wait – wrong antipodean reference. Avo on toast? No, not that either. This AVO is another piece of uniquely Australian life that slipped through the geofence a few weeks ago and on to the Mail’s UK homepage – an Apprehended Violence Order, or restraining order, which can be applied for in alleged cases of domestic abuse. And that’s before we even contemplate “farewell” as a verb – unheard of in Britain but a common feature of southern-hemisphere English.

Two unexplained regionalisms in the same celebrity headline? It’s just another day on Planet Anglophone News. More recently, a “finance pro” – albeit this time explicitly “from Sydney” – has saved $158.55 (presumably that’s Australian dollars) with some thrifty tips.

But as you read to the bottom of the article, you come across a plain factbox, unnervingly universal in tone, suggesting you “bring your own water” to the airport. Best of luck with that in the UK and the US, where bottled drinks have been summarily removed from carry-on bags at security for the past 20 years.

Now, of course this time due notice of location has been served at the top of the article. You can’t put the word “Australia” in every paragraph, and nor should you if you’re trying to be taken seriously by an Australian audience. Nonetheless, one does flinch slightly at consumer advice that suits only one country being broadcast across two other continents.

What to do? Last week, regular reader Paul had a suggestion: “Perhaps one answer is to have datelines on every web story, as on news agency feeds,” he writes. It’s a thought: and it is something that the Mail currently succeeds at better than the Tribune. We have remarked before that the Mail’s bylines could be larger and a less pale shade of blue, but they are at least some signal of location: “Reporter X for Daily Mail Australia”, or, more gnomically for the US, “Reporter X for Dailymail.com”.

Every media organisation likes to advertise where their foreign correspondents are stationed in the byline. But the arguments against having true datelines, specific to towns and cities, on home news stories are well rehearsed in Fleet Street. National papers shouldn’t be boasting about reporting “from Doncaster”, as though wanting congratulations for catching a train to Yorkshire, and if one were to specify where every single story were written, an embarrassingly high number would be datelined “… in London”.

Also, as Paul observes, it might not always solve the anglosphere problem either: “Australian coverage, especially when place names have been transplanted from the UK, can cause initial confusion until you realise the story is about Newcastle, New South Wales and not Tyneside.” That’s true: it could also be tricky reporting from Ipswich (Queensland), Harrogate (South Australia) or Chelsea (Victoria). But, as a policy, it might be worth a try.

The three-newsroom problem

Vienna – “Austria’s capital, Vienna” – is the most liveable city in the world, and the Tribune is all over the story. Global news, global news organisation: it’s the perfect fit. Except that, no sooner have we announced the winner than, one paragraph later, we’re straight into a controversy about … Auckland.

Now, Auckland was last year’s winner by reason of its strict lockdown, and now it’s 34th for the same reason, which is interesting. OK. But two brief paragraphs about Vienna later, we move on to … Melbourne. Melbourne came tenth.

Then we address Australia’s other major cities, none of which are in the top 25. Finally, at paragraph seven, we get to a brief rundown of the six European cities in the top 10.

By paragraph 11, we’re back on the subject of Melbourne, with a quote from the premier of Victoria,

and you start to suspect that, just possibly, this global-interest story about all the world’s cities was filed by the Australian office. The byline tells you only that the article is by “Staff and agencies”,

but the dateline reveals a launch time of 2.43am, British summer time – approaching 10pm for the US office, which is day shift only, but 11.43am, right in the middle of the working day, down under.

The Tribune has three fully fledged newsrooms: London, New York and Sydney. The demerits of having a trio of autonomous operations running in parallel have been rehearsed at length in this blog, but of course there are merits as well. For instance, live blogs and big rolling stories in one country can be kept alive all night and into the morning by the other two offices; as a natural consequence of the time zones in which it operates, the Tribune never sleeps now. Quality of coverage may dip a little as, say, London reporters wrestle with the snakepit machinations of Capitol Hill, but breaking political news at 5am EDT will be up ready for a breakfast audience across the US before the baton is handed back.

In these circumstances it is instinctively understood who the story “belongs” to, and which are the senior and junior newsrooms in each case. There is also a clear, if slightly troublesome, policy about whether you should write local news chiefly for a local audience in each jurisdiction: the answer is yes, even if those stories sound a bit baffling to readers abroad. The three-newsroom problem that we do not seem to have addressed yet is what to do about stories of apparently global relevance where all the interest will in fact be local, and vary according to where it is being read.

Last year we discussed the Sydney-bureau story about heat deaths around the world in which all the experts quoted were Australian. This story has a further problem: despite introducing antipodean figures as though they were familiar names, it also tries to adopt a slightly tortured citizen-of-nowhere approach to the geography (“Switzerland’s Zurich”, “fellow Swiss city Geneva” and so on). London, the Tribune’s home and headquarters, is not mentioned until the 18th paragraph. The same is true of New York (or, as the article calls it, “the US city of New York”).

A conscious attempt at impartiality mixes with the subconscious desire to find relevance for the home market, and for two-thirds of its audience the story jars. But it’s hard to believe that writers in New York or London would, or could, have approached it any differently.

And that leaves us with a suggestion that defies efficient planning and good internet practice, but seems to make the most journalistic sense: if you have three newsrooms, are there in fact some stories that you need to cover three times?

Feel the need for speed

Wow, Tom Cruise flew himself to the Top Gun premiere in a helicopter!

Oh no he didn’t!

Oh yes he did!

In fact, it says here he “slowly descended it”:

The trouble with reading an article when the Mail Online repair crew is halfway through fixing it is that it can be difficult to work out what’s going on. Pieces get rushed up, problems get spotted, angles get tweaked, but it doesn’t all happen at once, and some things don’t get put right for hours, or at all.

This article, on the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick in San Diego, went live at one in the morning in the UK

– or 5pm on the day of the event Pacific time, so very promptly indeed, and one or two spur-of-the-moment misunderstandings are to be expected. Obviously someone has been back in to the body text to remove the claims about Cruise doing his own piloting, and toned down the article headline

but, as of 9:28 the same morning, the video caption, picture caption and homepage headline remain uncorrected.

One or two other things don’t seem to be quite right either. Top Gun came out in 1986, so this is all happening 36 years later, not 34 years later as the headline claims. Also, at one point it says of Cruise’s co-star Jennifer Connelly:

But Connelly wasn’t in the original Top Gun. The character she is now playing, Penny Benjamin, was mentioned in the first film but never shown – she is the unseen admiral’s daughter in the line “You lost your qualifications as section leader three times … with a history of high speed passes over five air control towers and one admiral’s daughter!”

However, a further four hours later, someone on the Mail has made another flyby

– it’s not clear why it took that long to get round to it, but perhaps the pattern was full – and things have improved considerably. The adding-up in the headline is fixed:

all traces of misinformation about Cruise flying himself in have been expunged:

and significant additions to the text now help you understand who many of the people in the 96 (96!) photographs embedded in the piece actually are.

Still and all, this has taken 14 hours of on-off editing, in public, to get right. I understand the urge to rush something up and be first with the news – you don’t want to hold on so tight that you lose the edge – but would 40 minutes of extra editing time really have been a disaster when your unique saturation coverage is bound to draw a big audience anyway?

And, as we have seen before, some of the more-haste-less-speed inaccuracies have survived even this rewrite; Connelly is still, in this version, “reprising” a role she has never previously played. Also, as part of the improvements to the piece, there is now a fact box about the helicopter itself – only it’s in such a raw state that it seems to have been downloaded straight from the Notes app on someone’s phone.

And so the cycle of improvement can begin anew – or it could if the repair crew, going Mach 2 with their hair on fire, hadn’t long since been forced to move on to other things.

Who, what, why, when, wherever

For a second, I thought we’d done it – I thought we’d found the first anglosphere news story that gives you no clue whatsoever about where it happened.

Comedian Celeste Barber, nationality unspecified, has made fun of influencer Adelina Lazarova, nationality unspecified, in a parody video following a storm over Barber’s mocking of model Emily Ratajkowski, nationality unspecified. And where did all this happen? That remains unspecified.

Lazarova was being mocked for backflipping out of a convertible Lamborghini in high heels on social media, and Ratajkowski was being teased over a seductive bikini videoclip, so the real answer to the question “where did this happen” is, of course, “on the internet”. Nonetheless, we have a Russian-born, Emirates-based influencer doing gymnastics (in New York, as it happens) and a British-born American model famous for her globetrotting, and finally we seem to be floating free in the borderless kingdom of online news …

Except that there are still one or two clues to bring us back to earth. That “copping” in the headline: that’s redolent of a certain southern-hemisphere flavour of English. And further down, it is reported that Barber is about to tour Australia. Why would that be of interest to anyone except people living in … ah, yes. A closer squint at the byline, in Mail Online’s pale, self-effacing font, confirms it: “By Caleb Taylor for Daily Mail Australia”. The reason that Barber’s location isn’t stated in the piece is not because it doesn’t matter any more – “hey, a story’s a story!” – but because she doesn’t need to be identified to an Australian audience. This is a case of the Mail trying to sound Australian, not trying to sound stateless.

But still, with regard to the Five W’s of reporting, this is the first anglosphere news piece I’ve seen that doesn’t make any explicit effort to answer the question “where?”. Indeed, if there hadn’t been a passing reference to Lazarova’s showing-off taking place in the US, there wouldn’t have been a geographical locator anywhere in the text. And, you might argue, in cases like this there doesn’t need to be: if the news (OK, “news”) happens on Instagram, then it happens everywhere at once. The mainstream media is hesitantly becoming stateless, expanding into markets bounded only by language, but social media doesn’t even have that constraint: you can sign up to all three protagonists’ accounts in a home-country native version of the app wherever you are. The only thing that may hold you back after that is the captions to Lazarova’s selfies, which are frequently in Cyrillic.

Credible edibles

Regular reader Steve has spotted this in Charles County, Maryland, where a potentially alarming incident involving some schoolchildren seems to have lost something in translation on the website of WTOP-FM, Washington’s top news radio station.

If you’re as hardened and streetwise as, er, a sub-editor, you may know that “edibles” in this sense is starting to mean “way of consuming marijuana orally rather than by smoking”: it refers to the modern equivalent of cannabis brownies and so on. If not, you may be more than slightly puzzled as to what all the fuss is about.

That definition hasn’t made it into Collins, the Tribune’s house dictionary, yet, but it is now on Merriam-Webster Online. Even the dictionary, however, may not be able to help us with this paragraph:

You sense the first sentence may be missing some key words before “contained”. But I’m not sure what kind of garble has taken place in the second one. It’s positively alarmist: as Steve says, does this mean inedible candy is probably safer?

Thankfully, everyone seems to be all right:

(Hang, on I thought you said earlier they’d definitely eaten some?) But if the principal’s letter to parents went out with anything like that muddle over “edible candy” in it, who knows what the queues might now be like outside the county’s sweetshops.

Slightly missing links

The trouble with hyperlinks is that, even though they don’t mean to, they add emphasis. They are, after all, in a different colour to the rest of the text, and often underlined. They stand out. Which means you need a bit of an ear for the rhythms of a sentence when you put them in:

“Why at the end of it” stops a little short of the end, as it were, as does the link to the obscure … provision. And although “Dominic Cummings claimed” is fine, “said Johnson told” unfortunately avoids highlighting either of the two salient parts of the sentence: Ian Paisley Junior and the idea of the story.

These are just infelicities of emphasis rather than meaning – rather like the Express’s erstwhile habit of putting sudden capitals in the WRONG place. Occasionally, though, an off-target hyperlink can create more peculiar effects, like this:

Here, even though you’re supposed to overlook these links, it throws you. Semantically, the verb phrase that begins “bring prosecutions for killings” finishes at “to an end”. But the emphatic red text stops three words early and encourages you to think the phrase has come to an end as well. So for a moment you think the government is planning to start bringing Troubles prosecutions again, not stop them.

Of course, you work it out in the end. But we’re supposed to be saving readers as much work as possible, so, along with colliding English-language news agendas and launching without revising, this is another thing old print lags have to get used to. In the old days, we would never underline anything at all; now we do it by accident.