

Jakob Nielsen: World's Best Headlines: BBC News - edw519
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html

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ashleyw
I love the BBC just because it's publicly funded — they don't even need to
grab your attention to make a profit from you!

It's a tax I can honestly say I don't mind paying!

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ZeroGravitas
I'm conflicted about this. It's actually a very regressive tax, you pay the
same whether you are rich or poor, whether you have 1 television or 20.

It's also enforced in an incredibly harsh manner and we (the taxpayers) are
actually footing the bill to send people to jail who get caught without a
license and then can't afford to pay it (though an outrcy in the House of
Lords massively reduced the number being imprisioned down from 200 to 20
(roughly) a year.

On the other hand, if it came up for debate and reform, certain political
factions would basically kill the BBC, which I love.

~~~
pbhj
The place where I work was sent a payment notice (we don't have any TVs
there). There was a strict instruction that failure to respond was a terribel
thing and bad things would happen to us. There were lots of ways to respond if
you wanted to pay or wanted to claim you already had a license.

There was no way to tell them you didn't need a license.

The next step is [they say in the letter] that they send an enforcement
officer to your address.

If they just had a general phone number or a "we don't have a TV" phone number
they'd have saved themselves at least the cost of sending someone out to try
and hassle us ... and I'm sure a lot of other people.

It's not my job to chase up their failure to provide contact details on a
demand for money.

OT: We got a parking fine when I took my wife in to have our baby last week.
The number to call to pay the fine is the wrong number ... gah! I'm just not
sure if this is malevolence.

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mahmud
Congratulations on the new born :-)

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gb
I'm not sure if there's much truth to it, but I read that the BBC news
headlines are so short as there is some central system that provides them to
Ceefax too (which can only display 24 rows of 40 characters).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceefax>

~~~
DLWormwood
That was actually mentioned in the article...

    
    
        So why is the BBC so good when most others are so bad? Maybe it's in the BBC's blood: The news
        organization originated as a radio station, where word count is at a premium and you must communicate
        clearly to immediately grab listeners. In a spoken medium, each word is gone as soon as it's
        uttered, so convoluted exposition confuses even more than it does in print.
    
        Ceefax (one of the few surviving videotext services) also helps instill conciseness in BBC's journalists.
        Text on low-def televisions has horrible resolution and only allows for a minute word count (somewhat
        like mobile).

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nopassrecover
BBC articles in the "latest headlines" RSS feed that comes with Firefox tend
to be poor - they often don't match the article itself and tend to be link
bait type titles. The alternative is when they give too little information.

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pbhj

        * Italy buries first quake victims
        * Romania blamed over Moldova riots
        * Ten arrested in UK anti-terrorism raids
        * Villagers hurt in West Bank clash
        * Mass Thai protest over leadership
        * Iran accuses journalist of spying 
    

2 of those are poor for one of the criteria given IMO.

* West Bank clash, villagers hurt * UK anti-terrorism raids, ten arrested

These front-load the headlines better so that if you know you don't like "West
Bank" articles you can skip the other ~20 characters and jump to the next
line. I don't think they are less readable either.

I have to confess I lengthened a headline from "Spiders reanimated" to "Spider
Nightmare: Spiders resurrected from the dead" the other day (
[http://digg.com/general_sciences/Spider_Nightmare_Spiders_re...](http://digg.com/general_sciences/Spider_Nightmare_Spiders_resurrected_from_the_dead)
).. it felt so dirty and multiply redundant, and didn't get me any Diggs as
National Geographic pipped me by 14 minutes with the story.

~~~
Elepsis
One of the guidelines nearly every publication practices for its headlines is
that each one should have a verb (one thing that the BBC also does well in the
above examples). The verb enables a reader to quickly grasp the "action" in
the story and gives people a better understanding of the central point of the
article.

Your rewrite does little more than remove the verbs, making the headlines less
clear, in my opinion.

~~~
iain
Actually, he removed the prepositions, not the verbs. I wouldn't mind the
front-loading as much if he didn't remove the prepositions, but to me those
two rearranged sentences sound awkward regardless.

I wonder if the journalists who write the articles choose the headlines, or if
the BBC has a `Headline Phraser' job.

~~~
Elepsis
Good point -- it doesn't remove the verbs entirely. However, it removes them
from their natural place in the sentence and puts them somewhere where they're
likely to be missed entirely. By front-loading the headline with only the
nouns, he puts what is arguably the most important part--what _happened_--at
the end.

But you are right that the awkwardness is mostly due to a lack of
prepositions.

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nevan
His site has different priorities than a newspaper, but I've always been fond
of Khoi Vinh's titles on <http://subtraction.com>, which have been
consistently good even since before he started working at the NYT.

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rams
BBC News Low Graphics Page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565470>

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lacker
No, the world's best headlines are on Wikipedia. Each article is titled
exactly what it is about.

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edw519
In the phrase "every word works hard for its living", every word works hard
for its living. What would you call that, a meta-sentence?

~~~
imp
I think we would need to consult Douglas Hofstadter about that one.

