Headlines- Good or Bad

One of the strongest ways to capture a reader is by having a good headline. The world we live in is one that demands conciseness and clarity, as there is not enough time in the day to read everything that interests us. The key words are "interest us" as this allows a writer to target their audience. One of the things that I have noticed is, that no matter if the story is about the same thing, there are several different ways to approach a headline.  An example of this is the recent issue with Donald Trumps speech that he gave. As you can see below there are several different ways to cover the story and provide a headline. Some writers chose to exploit the "stupid" comment and others chose to just talk about the attack without emphasis on what was said.

When it comes to good and bad headlines that can sometimes be a personal opinion and other times it is just a poorly written headline. I felt like, in the example above, that Reuters did a good job of writing a good headline. It was informative and it made me feel as if they were not taking sides and writing as a journalist should. An example of a bad headline would be the one below about Mariah Carey. To be honest I wasn't really sure what the headline was about initially until I took a minute to think about it. The author could have written a much better headline by replacing the word "serves" by "lend" or even just removing it.

The error I found this week was during some research after I completed a writing assignment for another class. The writing assignment was to write a press release for the Nearly Naked Mile that Weber State is hosting. I had the assignment completed but I saw that there was a Facebook post about the Nearly Naked Mile. When I read it, I had something similar in my press release, but I noticed that the word "encourages" should not have contained an "s" in it. I emailed this same error to the instructor of the class so I'm sure it may have been fixed by now.

The Sixth Annual Nearly Naked Mile is back, hosted by the Weber State University Student Association (WSUSA) Senate.

Participants are encouraged to donate gently used warm articles of clothing or cans of food. This year, the clothing will be donated to St. Anne's Homeless Shelter in Ogden. We also encourages participants to donate food items to the Weber Cares program, which helps feed students in need throughout the year.

Registration begins at 5:00 p.m. in the Shepherd Union ballrooms, with the run commencing at Water Fall Plaza at 6 p.m. The 1-mile course winds throughout the Weber State campus, passing the duck pond and Moench statue before ending back at the Shepherd Union Building. Afterwards, awards for creative costumes and various prizes will be given out to those in attendance.

The event is free and open to the public, although donations of two clothing items or two cans of food are strongly encouraged. The always-coveted “Nearly Naked Mile” t-shirts will also be sold
for $7.