Generally, though, you know, too late of course, when you've screwed up.
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When I read the headline "Sex offender with a heart," I was as angry as many of the readers who have since let us know just how inappropriate they thought it was. I was angry for the same reasons you were, but also, of course, because my newspaper published it. My name is there on our masthead and the buck stops here.
If you missed it, the story in question was about a New Milford man who told a judge that he wanted to plead guilty to avoid putting the 5-year-old girl he molested through the pain of testifying at a trial.
What were we thinking with that headline?
Well, as I was fuming at my kitchen table on Saturday, my wife had to explain it to me. It was an attempt at sarcasm, irony. In other words, something ridiculing the fact that this child molester thought he deserved admiration and that he was doing a favor for this child he had horribly victimized.
The problem is that sarcasm and irony almost never work in a big, black lead headline of a daily newspaper. And when it comes to stories about sexual abuse, you just don't go there.
In my previous life as corporate director of news for the company that owns The Register Citizen, reacting to and counseling headline writers on these kinds of mistakes was part of my job in working with editors at papers of various sizes from Michigan to Rhode Island to Pennsylvania's Amish country.
Headline mistakes fell into three basic categories - insensitive handling of a tragedy (the "Game Over" headline that ran in one of our newspapers when Yankees pitcher Corey Lidle was killed in a plane crash); warping the true gist of the story (almost always because the editor who assigned or is laying out the story feels the reporter didn't come up with something as interesting as they hoped it would be, so heck, we'll make it more interesting); and simple, sloppy factual errors (a day, time, person or topic referenced in the headline not matching the story).
"I just write the articles, I don't write the headlines" was a favorite phrase of mine as a reporter 15 years ago, and, I am sure, is still used used by reporters today.
Most bad headlines fall into a fourth category - too boring or vague to make anyone want to read the story. I have told many an editor over the years that they should replace "Committee mulls decision on ordinance proposal" with a headline of "Please do not read this article" and it would sell more newspapers.
Unfortunately, I can guarantee you that 100 percent of the bad headlines from the first two categories mentioned above are misguided or lousy attempts to fix the problem posed by the fourth category.
Headlines can also set an overall tone for a newspaper, and even a community. A frequent complaint I hear from readers and community leaders is that too many large headlines, day after day, talking about crime and scandal, paint a bad and unfair picture of the area. For every bad story out there, there's a good one - and there are even a number of stories that could be perceived as both bad and good. We had a headline on a school test results story saying that Torrington "failed again" while another newspaper had a headline on the same story saying "City school makes the grade." Both were correct.
People want to read good news - hence, the launch and great success of a publication devoted to it, "Good News About Torrington" - but they also want to know about car accidents, crime, misuse of public funds, school department scandal and nasty politics.
Our job is to give it to you straight, easy to find and easy to read. But with a sensitivity that doesn't cross the type of line that we did on Saturday.
Matt DeRienzo is publisher of The Register Citizen. He can be reached at 860-489-3121, ext. 350, or by email at mderienzo@registercitizen.com.
