Headlining Acts

Anyone who's ever been published, whether in print or pixels, has striven long and hard for the perfect headline or title. We've all had our precious handfuls of pregnant words aborted by an uppity editor convinced they can do better -- and herein lies the peculiar attraction of headline coining.

Every writer's quest for the perfect headline is the equivalent of the hole in one in golf. The odds against them achieving it are huge, but it can be done. Some headlines are so good that they render the actual article utterly redundant. Their small, perfectly formed punning perfection is the story; the rest is silence.

Grail-questing journalists often spend just as long formulating a headline as they do writing their stories, sometimes even whiling away the hours before deadline coming up with fantasy headlines. I once met an obituary writer in the QF Tavern who, after bumming a cigarette and the 50c he needed for another pint of Guinness, exclaimed: "I can't wait for that Maggie Barry to kick the bucket, I really can't."

This not being entirely apropos of our foregoing charity-based conversation, I pressed him to explain, but he blustered on with: "But she's got to have a heart attack or a fatal stroke . . . " His sentence ended in a deep draught of Guinness, leaving me none the wiser. After an equally deep drag on my too mild cigarette, he said: "And it's got to happen in a park, or even better, in some botanical gardens . . . "

After another Guinness and smoke coupling, I attempted to recap: "You can't wait for Maggie Barry to die of a heart attack in the botanical gardens?" "Zigackly!" was his response. "Why?" was inevitably mine. "Because I have the perfect headline for her obituary!" he triumphed. "'Live by the sward, die by the sward'!"

*****

But there is one publication that seems not only to have abandoned the quest for the journalistic Holy Grail but also lost all self-respect. The best measure of any publication's self-respect is the quality of its proofreading. The New Zealand Herald's proofreading has been a joke for so long that Aucklanders accept the paper's daily errors as a fact of life, like Auckland's high humidity. 

One would be hard pressed to find a high school newspaper with more incompetent proofreaders than the Herald's. Below is just one of the more recent fiascos to have slipped through the newspaper's proofing net (if such a thing exists):

As one of my colleagues quipped: "It takes forever to get there . . . but when it does, it's terrible." For God's sake, Herald, grow some coglioni!