One of the horrors of writing for a newspaper is when a pathetic copyeditor slaps a wildly lame headline on your story. It's even worse when you've been recruited to write neutered personal columns that run with your picture.
This headline somehow evokes both Steve Martin's doofus hipster and Joe Piscapo's Jersey Guy characters from SNL. Not flattering. Humiliating, actually. But some decent writing for sure, that might look familiar to fans of my Thailand journal.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
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2 comments:
Don't you get to write your own headline? It's not even as if this an article about some other person or event. It's YOUR fucking column - about YOU! What kind of bullshit is this?
Did you have a headline that got canned? If so, what was it?
Also, does this mean you'll be running more personal columns in the future? If so, this means I might actually start reading your thnt.com links.
And isn't having your own column some kind of "step up" in the newpaper world? Are congratulations in order?
Actually, these columns are a misguided attempt by our publisher to "brand" the reporters and appeal to the squishiest instincts in our mostly octagenarian readers.
Everyone's got one, so I'm not special.
In most newsrooms, reporters don't write their own headlines. This is because until the paper gets laid out, you don't know how much space you have. Heads are written to fit the space.
The columns will run in roughly the same space, so I bitched about the headline thing (I mean, not only is the article in the first person, but the stupid copyeditor wrote a headline in the first person). And now we should be able to suggest our own headlines.
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