We don’t know where our online headlines will end up. Our article headlines are what the search engines use to figure out what we’re talking about. In print, you have all sorts of context. Online your context is not guaranteed. The headline is the most-often piece of linked text, which means it’s got to be able to stand by itself in the middle of nowhere dot com and still make sense.

With that in mind, here are some tips on making headlines work better on the web. The examples included are from the morning’s headlines on denverpost.com, and all of them have since been fixed (thanks, Demetria):

Use place names and people names as often as possible.

Labels like “city” and “state” should never be a headline’s only word used to describe location. Be specific. Column widths don’t control your pen like they did in the past.

• Example: “Growers cheer as rains put state totals near norm” works much better when it’s “Growers cheer as rains put Colorado totals near norm”
• Ex: “Police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” makes no sense on its own, “Montrose police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” helps a little more.
• Ex: “More farmers losing hope” could apply to farmers anywhere in the world. “More Colorado farmers losing hope” fixes that.
• Ex: “Justice not on city’s to-do list” could apply to any city. “Justice not on Denver’s to-do list” makes it clear which on we’re talking about.
• Ex: “Lottery a loser in current economy.” — “Colorado lottery a loser in current economy”
• Ex: “Star’s status does affect at-risk kids” — “Brandon Marshall’s star status does affect at-risk kids”

Abbreviations make sense to us, and the people who are familiar with us. They may not make sense to search engines, or the non-Denver Post lingo savvy.

• Example: ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Springs’ — ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Colorado Springs’ is much more explicit about the location, and that this happened in Colorado.
• Ex: ‘No doubt Nugs are for real’ is not hard to turn into ‘No doubt Nuggets are for real’

Puns are nonsense, and explicit trumps cutesy 95% of the time.

Here are some cutesy heds — try imagining if you saw those links on a list of headlines, and whether you have enough information about what’s on the other side of that click to consider making that click.

• Example: “High dudgeon — and other bits”
• Ex: “Hard slog on dimes and nickels”
• Ex: “Heart was dialed in on caring”
• Ex: “Forget that game, but not this team”

Watch out for label headlines.

If you have a label headline, often there’s a subhead, and often that subhead is what should be the headline online.

• Example: “Facebook time travel” — this one had a great subhead, “Old friends are new again using social networking — from the comfort of their own laptop”. There are a couple ways to approach this rewrite, and “Facebook time travel: Old friends are new again using social networking” gets the point across best.
• Ex: “Hoop Dreams” could have easily been “Hula Hoop Dreams: A rigorous workout with meditative benefits puts a new spin on an old toy”

If you’ve got any more resources about writing headlines for online, or suggestions, add ‘em in the comments below.

To Whom It May Concern:

I currently live in Springfield, Anystate. I work full time and am a part time student. I just had a gentleman stop by my house to offer me a FREE subscription to the Local Times for this semester and the only I would have to pay for is $.50/week to pay the deliverer. I kindly declined his offer because I am just not interested. I read my news online and I was just not interested in the offer. Here is how our conversation continued:

Seller: But you’re a student, right?

Me: Yes, but I’m just not interested.

Seller: But it is just $.50 a week. Fifty-cents!

Me: Thank you, but no thank you.

Seller: proceeded to share his head, turn to go down the stairs and then whistled (not a cheery tune, mind you, but a whistle that a person does when he just can’t believe something) and then he mumbled something

Me: Excuse me, sir, what did you say? Did you just say that I was retarded?

Seller: No, I said that people around here are retarded. Have a nice day.

Me: Sir!

Seller: Oh, don’t take offense. You’re not the only one. We usually only get 8 out of 10. Have a nice day.

Me: Get a life.

I am NOT impressed!! What kind of person is this? I’m afraid that I don’t even know his name and I’m not even sure if he works directly for you or if he works for the university. Either way, it reflects upon YOU. I just wanted to mention this so that if you knew of who it was you could possibly mention that that kind of service isn’t impressive.

Thank you for your time on this matter.

Sincerely,
Angelina Clinton

In my college days back in the 90s I used to photocopy my clips. I’m sure people still do that. Photocopying is easy — it’s just paper, getting copied to another piece of paper. Clips online? More complex. Caveat: I’m coming at this from a “I know a lot about online and this is what I would do if I were in this situation” angle, not a “I am a reporter looking for another job as a reporter and this is what I’ve found success in doing.”

There are two main ways to save your online work: saving the words, and saving how it looked.

Saving the words of your clips

This is useful in case you someday create an online portfolio of your work. It’s also useful for creating things like a PDF collection of your clips. Saving the words makes sure you don’t have to resort to scanning or retyping the printed version of your work just so you have something that plays nice on a computer. Go find your work. Select the text, copy it and paste it. If your article spans multiple pages, then the printer-friendly version is your friend. I would paste the text into a Microsoft Word or Open Office document, and save it. Make sure the date the piece was published is included in the information you save. If you have a lot of clips, I would save each in its own document. If you don’t, putting them all in one doc oughta be fine.

If there are photos, copy and paste the photos w/ captions into the Word doc, at the end of the article. If you’re technically inclined or a perfectionist, I recommend saving the photos to the folder you’re saving the documents with your words in them, adding the caption information to the file’s EXIF data, and using this naming convention for the photo: SLUGNAME20090114.jpg, where the date would be the publish date of the article.

Saving how your clip looked

This goes in tandem with the words, and it’s proof that some day in the future, after the NY Times is dead and gone, that you really did pen that piece for the NYT. The best way to prove this is to take a screenshot of your article. There is screenshot software out there, and I’ve used most of them. The best way to save a screenshot of a web page is the firefox browser plugin Pearl Crescent Pagesaver (note: if you don’t have firefox get it get it get it).  Pagesaver takes a shot of the entire page, not just the visible portion. It does a lot of other things. It’s free (though there is a paid version, with extra geek functionality). It made my screenshot-making life a panoply of rainbows and happiness.

I recommend keeping the filename pagesaver suggests, and prepend the filename with the year-month-date that the article ran (such as 20090114, if it ran January 14th of 2009). This makes it easier to sort and to find your screenshots.

Hope this helps,
Joe

Sure, many others have talked about how articles are a shabby content crutch in this information age. But until you can afford that brand new pair of Holovaty-brand bionic legs, build on your success…. no, not your home page — that wreck of a page oughta be put to death, not built on. Build on your article page.

Here are some ideas for apps that can harness and extend the power of your article page:

• An in-house article bookmarking tool. This is Ryan Sholin’s idea, and it’s a good one. I mean, what fraction of a percent of people are actually using those social bookmarking links on every page of your article? Sure, this requires some sort of registration system to handle the data, but you have one of those, right? And think, once it’s done, it’s another way to break the page-view vice and figure out what articles your readers are so interested in, they bookmarked it to come back to later.
• Loomia’s “People Who Like This May Also Like...” widget. Now, I haven’t used this so I can’t speak to its greatness, but I can tell you this: it’s free. Well, okay, not really — it’s $50 a month, if you do fewer than one million views. But hey, that’s cheap. And as someone who is probably cheap themselves (kidding, kidding), I’m sure you appreciate that.
• Add your most-popular article lists. Better yet, integrate your section-specific most-popular lists. If you’re feeling adventurous, put your section-specific least popular lists on there — show the people what they’re missing. Don’t have a most-popular app? Do you have any type of site stats package? Well, get yourself a freelancer and fix that problem. It shouldn’t take more than 5 hours for a freelancer to build an awful-but-works app… make that ten hours if they’re the brother / sister / cousin of someone you know.

Got any you’d like to share? Let me know~

Note: I see the a snarky tone in this post. I can’t say I’m proud of that, and I can’t say it won’t happen again. If you have any suggestions for handling the snark (or a good newsroom “I-can’t-believe-they-said-that”-type joke), won’t you throw it my way?

Most-Useful Extensions

Do you want to email a long link to a page? Use this to create (and copy to your clipboard) a shorter version of that link. I use this multiple times every day. When the link to a story page is really long (like those created by IPS), when you paste a link to it in an email, it will often break. When replying to customer emails this is unacceptable … so tinyURL it instead.

Web Developer toolbar: If you don’t know what this is and you do stuff for the web, you oughta. It’s an arsenal of tools that make many parts of web development easier: You can edit CSS “live” on a page, you can automatically fill all the form fields on a page, you can view a page with all the javascript references included inline, you can resize your browser to specified widths…

Good screen-capture program. This puts a button in your top button area that saves an image of the entire browser screen (even the stuff you have to scroll to see) in your My Documents folder. I use this regularly with IPS support, and it’s also useful for certain customer-service requests.

Extensions Definitely Worth Considering

• PDF Download “Allows to choose if you want to view a PDF file inside the browser (as PDF or HTML)”
• Greasemonkey allows you to run custom javascript on your browser on particular sites. What does this mean? It’s basically a way to fix all the stuff you don’t like with the sites you regularly use.
• SiteDelta “Highlights changes made to a website since last visit.”
• Colorzilla “Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.”
• MeasureIt “Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.”
• Advanced Dork “This small, yet powerful extension was designed to give quick access to many of Google’s Advanced Operators.”
• JSView “All browsers include a “View Source” option, but none of them offer the ability to view the source code of external files. Most websites store their javascripts and style sheets in external files and then link to them within a web page’s source code. Previously if you wanted to view the source code of an external javascript/css you would have to manually look through the source code to find the url and then type that into your browser.”
• Text Complete “The text complete extension adds shortcuts and auto complete functionality to text fields within web forms, the thunderbird message composer, and various other fields within the firefox browser.”

Extensions Worth Considering

• Table2Clipboard “If you want to paste data in Microsoft Excel and make it work right use Table2Clipboard.”
• Dilbert “Adds little button to status bar and when you click it, it will show today’s official US Dilbert from
  www.dilbert.com. “
• Html Validator validates your HTML. Why do you want valid HTML? Because it’s one of the first steps to figuring out all the cool stuff you can do with the internet.
• Custom Buttons “Gives a possibility to create custom toolbar buttons.”
• Operator “Operator lets you combine pieces of information on Web sites with applications in ways that are useful.”

Each feed you publish ought to have its own “link” tag because it makes it easier for folks to find your feeds.

This code belongs in the head of your HTML page (I usually keep mine on my home page, though some CMS’ do this automatically and do it differently). It looks something like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" text="Reader Reactions" title="Reader Reactions"  href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/jnow-readerreactions"  description="Reader Reactions"/>

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Joe Think: RSS 2.0 feed" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/joethink_rss" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Joe Think: Atom 0.3 feed" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/joethink_atom" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Joe Think: My recent reads" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/joethink_reads" />