Inside Out: A dying art — writing heads that do the job

Did you know that an old-timey copy editor would figure the name “Mashomack” as 10.5 character “units” when he or she was counting a headline to see if it would fit? I didn’t think so.

In my world of arcane factoids, which was laid down in the 1970s, this is fascinating stuff. With his knowledge, our noble copy editor with the cigar, the strapped-on visor and the banded rolled up sleeves would have known that, at 10.5 units, “Mashomack” would fit nicely into one line of 30-point type across one standard broadsheet column. He’d write it down on a headline sheet, note the font style and size and the column width, and give it to a typesetter.

He (in the very old days always a he; more recently, with the advent of cold type, almost always a she) would give it to a compositor; more recently, it would have gone to a make-up person. They would have stuck the block of lead type or the strip of paper into place.

Another tidbit you don’t need to know unless you spend time at cocktail parties attended by retired union typesetters from the Times or the Daily News: Nobody counts headlines anymore. That’s why I don’t know what the count is for a modern tabloid column width.

It doesn’t matter. Now we just type heads into a layout on our computer screens to see if they fit. Often that layout, and the type style, size and width, once dictated by the copy editor, is predetermined by a graphic designer for variety and what he or she thinks is the best overall look.

The counting systems give one unit for most letters, two for the big ones like capital M, one and a half for lower case m and w, one-half for punctuation. There’s no need to know that anymore. If a head doesn’t fit, you can see it on your screen and fix it.

In the old days, a copy editor would never have handed over a headsheet to a typesetter with headlines that wouldn’t fit. All the rewriting already had taken place as he labored with a pencil to get the counts right, yet still keep the headline true to the story and maybe even catchy and clever to boot.

Rewriting a head isn’t necessary to make it fit these days. The type and the spaces between the type can be squeezed and the type size can be shrunk or enlarged and the style can be changed with the click of a mouse. Bingo! The headline may look different, graphically, but so what?

Maybe, if somebody changes a head to a lighter-weight font to make it fit, readers will get a subtle message that the paper is down-playing the story because the head no longer looks like a screamer. We did that at the Reporter in November: a bold banner head across the top on Glenn Waddington’s lead on Election Day; a lighter banner head across the top when Jim Dougherty turned out to be the winner. Whoops. To the avid supporters of Mr. Dougherty, maybe it was further evidence of our calculated bias against him. More likely, no one noticed.

I think the elasticity of the typesetting and layout process — and the staffing changes it prompted — has had a drastic effect on the art of headline writing, at least when it comes to print journalism. It’s disappearing. No one’s teaching it anymore. It’s just a mechanical part of the production process. At more and more smaller newspapers, I suspect, there’s one old guy or gal left who was actually trained to fret about the look and message of a headline from an editorial perspective. Here at the Reporter that’s my job and I don’t always do it as well as I’d like to because I’m distracted by other worries.

Last week’s edition of the Reporter had a page-one head with the preposition “on” at the end of its top line. Ugh. That’s aesthetically hideous and an abomination grammatically and syntactically. It was no one’s fault but mine. I wrote it ahead of time, before the layout had been assembled, and somehow never noticed after it was “flowed” into the layout that it didn’t break right.

One keystroke would have fixed it. My lingering annoyance with myself and nobody else is why you’ve been treated to this riff.