Headlines, Photos, Captions
| If you're not careful writing and editing headlines, you could end up with stuff like this: |
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| So here are some helpful rules and guidelines for writing and editing headlines: |
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Headlines Must Be Accurate Read the entire story before even thinking about the headline. A good headline summarizes the essence of the article. Headlines Must be True to Tone Creativity is fine, under certain conditions, but don't create a whimsical headline for a serious story, and don't get wrapped up in your own cleverness—make sure you're writing for your audience, not for yourself. Cleverness should contribute to meaning, not be a means for you to show off. Don't Repeat the Lead Line Your headline should be even better than the lead. Keep it Simple and Direct Use descriptive, active verbs rather than adjectives and adverbs. Sounds easy, but it's tricky. For example, consider "Police Chase Winds Through Several Towns." Are chase and winds verbs or nouns? Avoid Clichés Like the Plague No explanation necessary. We can go on and on listing rules until the cows come home, but these are the major ones and also the only ones we'll deal with here. |
| Exercises |
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Rewrite the headline for each of the following three stories. For the Whitewater Sparkly Tribune: The City Council in Whitewater, Wisconsin Passes a Crazy-Assed Measure that Will Ban All Students from Leaving their Campus and Entering the City Itself The Whitewater City Council today approved a new measure that would ban all University of Wisconsin-Whitewater students from leaving campus grounds. Citing statistics from police reports, Common Council Committee Chair Cruella DeVille said, "It's obvious that most civic violations are perpetrated by UW-W students. It's time for us to reclaim our city." DeVille listed numerous public intoxication, drunk driving, public urination, public deposit of human waste, lewd behavior, and noise violations and demonstrated that 93% of said violations were directly attributable to University students. She said Whitewater residents' complaints about student misbehavior had risen alarmingly in recent months and that action by the city was the only recourse. The City Council voted unanimously in favor of the measure. Starting in May 2012, Whitewater will begin erecting a 12-foot electrified fence around the entire campus perimeter, in accordance with Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain's suggestion for an electrified fence along the U.S. border with Mexico, with limited entry and departure points that will be monitored by heavily armed S.W.A.T. members. Students attempting to leave campus grounds illegally will be arrested and, if necessary, painted green and blue. For the Birmingham News: Shake a Leg—Japan Style 25 November 2008 “I wanted to see women get scared and shake their legs,” police quoted 35-year-old Manabu Mizuta as saying. This guy looks like quite a fetish lover and maybe one that will spend some time in lock-up. A Japanese man was arrested for releasing hundreds of beetle larvae inside a moving express train to try to scare female passengers, police said Tuesday. Local police had been on alert after 18 similar cases of released worms had been reported this month by the same train operator. “When the arrest was made, the man had nearly emptied a container, which is believed to have held 200 worms,” he said. “You cannot count them because there are so many." Mizuta had 10 containers in his backpack estimated to contain a total of 3,600 worms, police said. “We have the worms sitting inside the police station right now,” the spokesman said. “You see them wriggling inside their clear cases. It’s really disgusting.” For the Charleston Gazette: Man Turns Tables on Police, Puts Them in the Gas Chamber 24 November 2008 A West Virginia man who police said passed gas and fanned it toward a patrolman has been charged with battery of a police officer. Jose A. Cruz, 34, of Clarksburg, was pulled over early Tuesday for driving without headlights, police said. According to the criminal complaint, Cruz smelled of alcohol, had slurred speech and failed three field sobriety tests before he was handcuffed and taken to a police station for a breathalyzer test. As Patrolman T.E. Parsons prepared the machine, Cruz scooted his chair toward Parsons, lifted his leg and “passed gas loudly,” the complaint said. Cruz, according to the complaint, then fanned the gas toward the officer. “The gas was very odorous and created contact of an insulting or provoking nature with Patrolman Parsons,” the complaint alleged. He was also charged with driving under the influence, driving without headlights and two counts of obstruction. Cruz acknowledged passing gas, but said he didn’t move his chair toward the officer nor aim gas at the patrolman. He said he had an upset stomach at the time, but police denied his request to go to the bathroom when he first arrived at the station. “I couldn’t hold it no more,” he said. |
| As a proofreader/editor, you will usually not be asked to provide photos. That's the task of the newspaper photographer or the author of the book/article. Occasionally, you may be asked to provide a photo, but in such instances the photo (or image) you provide would be stock—in other words, from a file of images that the newspaper or publisher (or company) has stored somewhere. Your task at that point would be to find a few appropriate photos or images from that file and probably have your superior make the final selection. But you will have to make sure the image is the right size, is positioned properly, is relevant and appropriate, is cropped if necessary, and has proper attribution. For newspapers, the task is pretty easy. Almost all papers have photographers, whether on staff (in which case photographers signed a contract assigning all picture rights to the newspaper) or freelancers (which again involves a contract, but only assigning rights on a per-picture basis). Crappy little newspapers have to get their images from somewhere else (on the wire or from some other source) and then negotiate the rights—a long process, which is why crappy little newspapers often don't have many photos. Most newspaper photos are one column wide. Exceptions are first-page photos (those found on the first page of each section), and in those cases some higher-ranking muckety-muck will decide on the photo size. Once in a while you may recommend that a photo span two columns, usually if the photo is particularly good or particularly dense with information, thus requiring a larger size for full impact. Sometimes, usually for head shots, you may decide on a half-column photo, using text wrap to embed the image. After determining the size, decide on location. Will it go below the headline? To the far right, with the headline wrapped around it? Somewhere in the middle of the text? Base these decisions on the nature of the photo and the content of the article. In other words, place the photo next to the section of the article that is most relevant to the image content. Lastly, attribution. Newspaper photos will usually have the attribution directly below the photo, flush right, in somewhat smaller font: |
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| Photo by John Carlberg - Whitewater Enquirer |
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Now, when using photos and other images in non-newspaper publications, things get tricky. Suddenly you have to deal with all sorts of issues like reprint permissions and copyrights, public and private domains, and citations and documentation. Whatever company or organization you're working for will surely train you in how they handle all of these situations, since noncompliance can mean lawsuit. So for our purposes, let's keep it basic and simple—academic books and journal articles. Limiting ourselves to academic publications simplifies the matter because academic publishers are cheap bastards. They never want to buy anything. And, generally, they want to do as little work as possible. So these types of publishing outlets usually put the onus on the author, telling contributers that they are responsible for obtaining the rights to photos and the like. The publishing houses sometimes provide the release form, but the authors have to hunt down whoever owns the image rights and either pay the fee or obtain the reprint permission. So let's assume that's already been done. Now your task is two-fold. First, in most academic publications, you add a label and caption to the photo, usually directly below and flush left. And the label is usually in bold while the caption is not. Next, you add the persmission statement directly below the label and caption line. Permission statements for photos and images usually read "Photo courtesy of John Carlberg" or words to that effect. Second, you add an entry in the references section at the end of the work just like normal: photographer's last name, comma, first name, period. Title of image (if it has one) in italics. If not, then the label. Let me show you: |
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| Fig. 1: Sunset in Aruba |
| Photo courtesy of John Carlberg |
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Then, the citation at the end: Carlberg, John. Sunset in Aruba. Now, if your publishing house follows Chicago style, it's all different. Let me just show you again; you'll be able to piece it together: |
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| 1 John Carlberg, Sunset in Aruba, original photograph. Reprinted by permission of the artist. |
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Clearly, when dealing with captions for academic publications, the caption is easy: just describe the photo or image succinctly and accurately. But when captioning photos for newspapers, captioning becomes more of an art form. Captions—or cutlines, as they're frequently called—must, like a good headline, draw readers into the story. Cutlines are full sentences, sometimes two. So here are some guidelines, provided by the American Press Institute:
Let's try it: |
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| Photo by John Carlberg - Whitewater Enquirer |
| Secretary of State Colin Powell, President George Bush, Defense Secretary Donal Rumsfeld, and Commerce Secretary Don Evans at a recent poker tournament, having already lost all their money and not knowing what to do with themselves. |
| See? Easy. Hah! |
| Your Task: |
| Take any one of the three brief articles above for which you edited the headlines, paste the text into Word, set it for three columns. Go get a photo that somehow fits, add yourself as the photographer, and write a caption. Watch positioning. Decide whether the photo will span one, two, or all three columns. Maybe it will be embedded. Maybe it will run across the top of the article. Print it out and turn it in. |