Friday, February 3
More pun-in tending headlines?
Boy, that has to be the worst example, too. But it does identify the subject I'm interested in: whether headlines have gotten "punnier" since so many people started receiving notification about the news via email and blogs (especially blog aggregators).
It could be that rather than any increase in the use of puns or other humorous plays-on-words in headlines, I'm just noticing these more since I started reading most of my news this way. Or, maybe this sort of headline has always been very common in science news headlines, and that's why I sense an increase, because I've been reading more science news in the last few months than ever before.
But I don't think either of those explanations totally explains the phenomenon, because I often notice that the headline on the feed is "punnier" than the real headline.
In any event, consider a few examples of punny headlines, from the last week or so:
From eurekalert, "Detection of hot halo gets theory out of hot water" (about the measurement of hot gases around a spiral galaxy; the gases were expected to be there but had not been measured before) (this one is just an ordinary punny headline)
From CNN, "One small step for trash is giant leap for ham-kind" (about the "SuitSat," which is quite nifty, especially since it's so efficient and eco-friendly, recycling the spacesuit itself as well as containing some spacetrash rather than just blowing it out into space). This example also illustrates another interesting phenomenon, where the headline on my RSS feed at Bloglines is not exactly the same as the actual headline. On Bloglines, it was "Recycled spacesuit is giant leap for ham-kind" instead. Actually, here I guess the feed headline was less punny, sort of disproving my theory rather than supporting it.
But this one CNN is an example of the punnier-by-feed phenomenon. The "real" headline, the one you'd get if you were browing the website itself rather than getting notice of news by feed, is "Drinking joins smoking as cancer risk." (If you haven't read the story, don't sweat it too much -- the bottom line is basically, all things in moderation.) The notice I got on Bloglines was "Don't drink to this latest cancer finding." Not all that funny, actually, but more interesting than the first headline. Made you think a bit, guess at what the story would say.
I suspect that, if these types of headlines are actually more common by feed, that's the real reason -- it's a way to get the reader to notice the story and click through to it. It's just interesting to me that the regular headlines weren't already performing that task well enough -- isn't that sort of the idea of a headline in the first place?
