Outviewing

I figure to date I've written some 1,047 distinct headlines on my three main blogs over the past 18 months. Yep, it's a year and a half today since I launched this, the grand-daddy of my blogging channels. That works out to a new headline popping out of my furry head every 12 hours or so.

Where do these synaptic bursts come from? We've all got bits of poetry, jingles, one-liners lying dormant inside our under-utilized brains, I figure. Birthing them is the trick; how to set them free?

Music, obviously, for me is the main source. I crib lines from song-writers all the time, usually consciously, but not always. Being a writer, I always want to give credit to the person who created the phrase, or at least the one who first brought it to my attention.

In the magazine & news businesses, a good headline writer is money in the bank. We live in such a sped-up news cycle that unless a headline is snappy, your story (regardless of merit) may well suffer from the disease of neglect.* On the other hand, if you write a catchy hed, your piece will most likely be checked out by your time-crazed audience.

Here, courtesy of my buddies at MyWire, is an excellent example of pretty fair headline writing. Sting in tail as wife sends scorpions in mail . It's rhythmic. The story's pretty neat, too. But, alas, not all stories contain such fascinating material.

It can be damn difficult to spruce up a piece on Medicare, for example, even though Alan Greenspan says that's the biggest economic crisis facing our nation. Forget sub-primes, they're just a hiccup. If I had to write a hed for that one, I'd probably go with: Greenspan's Latest Warning: Everyone's Gonna Die!

My buddy Gary Kamiya at Salon figured this out years ago. In the mid-90s, as we were getting used to the new ability, courtesy of the Internet, to see precisely which stories resonated with our readers,he came up with a sure-fire formula to boost our page-views.

"Build 'oral sex' into a headline, and they will cum."

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* R. Zimmerman sings of "the disease of conceit."