7. Headlines and Captions

In most situations, headlines and captions get written for you. Occasionally, however, you may have to write them yourself, for example if you are working with a small-circulation magazine or employee newsletter (see Chapter 12) with few in-house subbing resources. Here is what you need to know about each.

Headlines

Try to distil your story down to just a few words, including an active verb. For example: ‘Fishermen reel as cod stocks plunge’. This example has the added advantage of including a double meaning or pun, which may or may not be appropriate depending on the overall style and tone of the publication. It also breaks neatly over two lines of text or ‘decks’:

Fishermen reel as
cod stocks plunge

Being able to break the copy in this way is important as headlines often take up more than a single deck on the page. The ideal headline will break equally well over one, two or three decks and will be easy to cut from the bottom. Here is a variation of our previous example, to illustrate the point:

Fishing stops
in cod slump
across the UK

Each line adds information to the one before it and can be chopped out without rendering the headline meaningless.

Captions

Check the caption style used in the publication you are writing for. Many use an introductory adjective as a way of grabbing the reader’s attention; for example: ‘Endangered – North Sea cod’. In any event, the caption should serve two purposes: to inform the reader and entice them to read more. Obviously, then, it needs to describe what is going on in the picture, but it also needs to get across something interesting or newsworthy. Finally, it needs to fit in the space under the picture. Which, in the case of a head-and-shoulders shot, can be very small indeed.