Print headlines often fail Web readers

"County to raise taxes on property."

"Smith calls for cleanup of polluted site."

"City to approve land-use plan tomorrow."

Headlines like those work just fine for a newspaper -- the print kind, the kind you pick up off your lawn in the morning and hold in your hands.

But they don't work so well online. And that makes it harder for readers to find the content they're looking for on your site.

When you hold the newspaper in your hands and your eye falls on a specific headline, the physical structure of the newspaper and the conventions of newspaper layout allow your brain to quickly put the headline in context.

For instance, imagine you pick up your newspaper and the headline says "County to raise taxes on property."

Right under the headline is the lead of the story, which tells you a little bit more.

Maybe the lead starts off with a dateline for a specific city. That tells you even more.

There could be a picture next to the headline -- a photo of the county mayor or commission voting to raise taxes. And there could also be other layout geegaws near the headline that help your brain sort it all out -- when I worked at a newspaper, the page designers made use of elements called "graybars," basically short, column-wide boxes of gray shading with the name of the affected county in white letters. (Other papers probably have something similar in their page-designers' toolboxes.)

Between the headline, the lead of the story, the photo, the dateline and the graybar, you can look at that story on the newspaper page and quickly discern what it is about and whether you want to read on or flip the page to the funnies.

But online, those headlines just don't work for me. And I have a feeling they don't work for a lot of other readers, too.

When you see a headline on a Web site, it is physically divorced from all those other newspaper elements. Online, there are no graybars to tell you what county is being discussed. Even on the Web site of a pick-it-up-off-the-lawn newspaper, you often can't see the lead, the dateline or the accompanying photo unless you click on the headline and start reading the story. (Maybe a couple of the biggest stories of the day will have photos with them, but for most of the stories, all you see on the newspaper homepage is the headline itself.)

And if the headline is divorced from such supporting elements online, then the marriage is totally annulled for news headlines being read through alternative delivery methods like RSS and Twitter.

An example: As an editor for a news Web site in Houston focusing on state and local government and freedom of information issues, I see scads of headlines every day through RSS (I'm a committed Google Reader user). And at least twice a day I see headlines like these:

"County to raise taxes on property."

Uh, OK, which county? I can maybe understand this headline appearing in a very small newspaper that really covers only one county -- but often these headlines are in much larger papers that cover several counties. I can't help but think that newspaper's readers are just as confused as I when they see this headline online.

"Smith calls for cleanup of polluted site."

OK, so, who's Smith? Is there only one guy named Smith in that town? Ditto on the polluted site -- is this a town so small that it has only one? (I'm sure the newspaper had a graybar or a dateline or something else with that headline, but again, none of those show up with the headline online.)

"City to approve land-use plan tomorrow."

Rerun: What city? Even most really, really tiny counties contain more than one city. (I clicked on a headline very similar to this the other day via an RSS feed from a small daily paper, assuming the headline was about the city in the newspaper's name. Come to find out, the city in question was a tiny city in the paper's circulation area.)

But this isn't a problem only for those of us who get our news through RSS. More and more people are reading their news on mobile devices, where Web pages can be slower to load -- and where users are paying dearly for every second of time needed to download the page. I don't know about you, but when I'm surfing the Web on my Blackberry, I'm a bit choosier about what links I click on. That headline has to be really strong, and really precise, for me to click on it to read a story. I'm more likely to say to a headline with so-so interest, "I won't read you now -- I'll try to read you later on, when I get home." I don't have the extra time (or money!) to click on every headline that says "County to raise taxes" to find out what county is involved. I'm going to pass that story by. When I get home, I might check it out on my computer, or I might not.

All of those headlines are fine for the newspaper -- that's the way newspaper people have been trained to write headlines for decades now (Anybody out there bought one of those "Area Man" T-shirts from The Onion?) But headlines that work in traditional print media often don't work online. Those of us who trained as newspaper people will find that our training, and our conventions, sometimes serve us poorly in the new digital sphere. Online, headlines have to stand on their own two feet.

Jennifer Peebles is deputy editor of Texas Watchdog (http://www.texaswatchdog.org), a nonprofit, online newspaper in Houston.