In today’s NYTimes, Eric touts the wines of Abruzzo has harboring great values:
Asimov:AbruzzoWines
Guess I can’t say I’m very familiar w/ the producers he touts. I’ve not tried any of Emidio Pepe’s wines but they didn’t strike me as anything of great values.
Tom
Just had my first Pepe Pecorino Friday night thanks to @Andrew_Christiansen
I thought it was extremely interesting. QPR, nope.
The headline didn’t capture the article at all, I doubt Asimov wrote it. The article was more like ‘once know for decent cheap plonk, the Abruzzo is now making really interesting wine.’
Yup, and that’s generally true, both in news organizations like the NYT and magazines. Of course, reporters/writers may suggest headlines.
Writing headlines is a real skill. That was particularly true in the case of traditional newspapers, where space was limited and yet you wanted to fill each line, all without hyphenating words or causing bad breaks (e.g., separating words that function as compounds, or separating “to” from the infinitive).
Here’s a good example from the top of today’s NYT hard copy page 1. Notice how each line is a phrase (or two). We’d say WTF if it read:
Most Biden
Voters of 2020
Fear He’s Too
Old to Lead.
Editors also generally write headlines at newswires like Bloomberg, Reuters and Dow Jones, where there are fixed character limits. Since those are breaking news services, it’s critical to write clear, accurate, literal headlines because traders (or their algo programs!) will be entering trades based on he headlines.
In the case of a column like Asimov’s, different factors come into play – like catchiness.
The bottom line: There are lots of ways that headlines can go wrong. If you’ve ever written them for a living (as you can probably guess that I have) and you know the thought that goes into them, it’s kind of miraculous that the vast majority are actually well crafted.
The headline was not ideal, but I didn’t think it misrepresented the column when you read it along with the subhead. Remember that they probably have a character limit for the main head.
I’ve been trying to figure out a main head that would capture the thrust of the article – that a new generation of winemakers has improved quality while still offering good value – and I can’t figure how to do that without a lot more than the 53 characters (including spaces) in the original.
You need “Abruzzo” and “wine” in the main headline, both for readers and for search engine optimization (to make sure Google etc. rank the article in response to searches for those terms). The best I’ve come up after a number of tries are both substantially longer:
With New Focus on Quality, Abruzzo Is a Great Source of Value in Wine (69 characters)
New Focus on Quality Makes Abruzzo Wine a Great Source of Value (63)
New Wave Winemakers Revitalise Abruzzo QPR
Thread drift: For some amusing ones which weren’t, see here. (It’s too bad that this isn’t being updated any longer.)
Or the Murdoch version,
New Generation Makes Abruzzo Great Again
Interesting article. I have enjoyed the wines from Masciarello in the past, and also currently enjoying Coavolich which is very well priced.