The Magazine Rack
One of my favorite features on MediaPost is The Magazine Rack, a weekly (or so) blog in which three alternating authors critique a wide range of magazines, from the biggest national general-interest periodicals to the narrowest niche publications.
It’s a great way to discover (and rediscover) interesting titles: This post, for instance, led me to two local newsstands to pick up not one, but two recent issues of the featured magazine — partly because I wanted to read one of the articles the review mentioned, and partly because Psychology Today is so consistently interesting that it seemed like a worthwhile buy. Another recent post features Saveur, one of the best food magazines out there.
If you love magazines, browsing through the Magazine Rack’s archives is well worth the time.
Headlines and parts of speech
Here’s one quick way to tell if the headline you just wrote might be confusing: Is it full of words with multiple meanings, or words that can function as multiple parts of speech?
For example, a Michigan daily from a neighboring county once ran this headline on its front page:
Leaves short sheriff
Which left me with two questions:
1) Who, exactly, left the sheriff?
2) Why do we care that the sheriff is short?
Turns out the story was actually about the fact that a high number of deputies were on leave, which resulted in the sheriff being short-handed. But since “leaves” is much more commonly used as a verb than a noun, and “short” is much more commonly used as an adjective than a verb, the end result was confusing.
Another example, from a daily in Iowa:
Blow eyes fine fund
This headline is especially interesting in that every single word in it can function as at least two separate parts of speech, and in some cases three. The story was really about a city official named Blow who wanted to take a pot of money generated from fines collected by the city and use it for one purpose or another.
I’ll concede that in one respect, both of these headlines did their job. They got me to read the story, or at least the subhead, because I wanted to find out what on earth they were talking about. But consistently making your readers say “What the heck does that mean?” is usually not a winning proposition for a newspaper.
In the interest of full disclosure, I once wrote one of these headlines myself. It was after someone stole about $10,000 worth of wine from a local restaurant, and the headline read:
Wine heist nets haul
Was it accurate? Yes. Was there any other way to describe the story in a one-column head using 48-point type? Probably not. And, yes, I admit I was pretty proud of the headline for that very reason. But on the clarity front, it probably left something to be desired.
First post
At the 2009 Michigan Press Association convention, speaker Jeffrey Gitomer asked: “How many of you have registered yourname.com? If you haven’t, then go home and do it tonight.”
That was several months ago, so I’m a little behind.
This site is built using Drupal, which after the initial learning curve is out of the way, turns out to be surprisingly easy to use. Which, considering how long it’s been since I did anything even vaguely resembling Web development — I’m surprised I even remember how to make a link — is a good thing.