Reviews

Sunil Saxena (2006) Headline Writing

London/New Delhi: Sage. ISBN 9780761934219. 220 pages. £14.99 paperback.

Headline writing is the foundling of journalism education: seldom researched, often neglected by handbooks, and sometimes not taught at all. Headline writing skills are supposed to be acquired through intuition and osmosis rather than formal education.

Yet headlines are probably more argued about, and more loved and hated, by journalists and their readers, than anything else which appears in a newspaper. They deserve our attention, for they represent the problematic distillation of events into a few words that can rarely do justice to the complexities of life beyond the subs' desk.

Take, for example, The Sun's infamous summing up of the sinking of the Argentine warship the Belgrano during the Falklands war with the single word: Gotcha! Later, famously, as the death toll dawned, the Sun switched to a longer, more nuanced line about how many 'Argies' might have died.

So strong is the case for more good books about the writing and context of headlines that I have been tempted to try to write one myself. I thought Sunil Saxena had beaten me to it when I was given a copy of his book to review.

Saxena covers all the bases in terms of training: a quick history, then straight into how to capture the essence of a story in a few words, for news, features, comment, reviews and pretty much anything else you would want to stick a headline on. He explains what to do when you want to tell a story, or when you want to establish a mood; how to polish your headlines until they shine; and the perils of clichés. His advice on good and bad headline shapes, along with other ventures into typography and the place of headlines in page design, are commendable. And, having spent half my subbing career working on paper rather than computers, I can vouch for his insistence that trainees should first learn to count characters and spaces before squeezing their efforts into digital text boxes, so that they get a feel for the weight of what they write. But Saxena is no dinosaur, and includes a fine chapter on internet headline writing. There is no wider contextualisation of headline writing in this book - no nod towards the academic study of how meaning is produced - but it doesn't pretend to be that kind of book. What Saxena does, with the aid of exercises at the end of each chapter, is provide everything that his students need to learn in order to write for their market.

I say their market because, for a British reader like myself, the catch with this book is its Indian context. Headlines are probably the most vernacular and thus least portable aspect of newspaper journalism, with profound differences even between those written in different branches of the same English language. The Indian variety of headline seems to be, suggests Saxena, a hybrid of British, American and homegrown styles. Fine in India: but at least one of his tips - using commas in place of 'and' - would get a sub sacked from a British paper. He pursues the vernacular further, quite rightly, and writes fascinatingly about the use of Hinglish (Hindi-English) words and phrases. And what he leaves out is just as interesting. Because while he recommends playing with words when appropriate, punning is not afforded the status it has in the British press. There is no sense, for a British reader accustomed to the belly laughs of British tabloid journalism, that headlines can (and indeed often must be) fun. It was a hundred pages or so before I smiled at anything in this book, let alone laughed.

Sage has launched the book in Britain but I am not convinced that any British tutor could responsibly recommend it to native students as a core training aid. True, many of the principles of headline writing are perhaps globally the same, but too many of them are not. I suspect that Saxena does not intend this to be a universal handbook anyway, since he mentions that he was motivated to write it to counter his students' reliance on British and American books, which must be as inappropriate for his students as his book would be for mine.

Saxena's timing is interesting. India is experiencing a boom in newspaper readership that could presumably fuel a further expansion in indigenous journalism education, with even more Saxenas producing books that go against the prevailing flow of textbook imports. But the very health of that market has attracted the attention of Western media moguls who are struggling to sell papers to the internet generation at home. Murdoch is said to have plans to launch The Sun in India, and the Daily Mail's owners are reported to be planning their own middle-market Indian tabloid.

British tabloidism has been successfully exported to the USA, so why not India? After all, the developing world has long been a dumping ground for things that 'we' no longer want, such as cigarettes, hand-me-down weaponry, and obsolete industrial plant.

If that does happen, then Saxena's students might need to dust off their British books after all and learn the language of Fleet Street headlines. But if Indian readers demand Hinglish and commas in their headlines instead, then perhaps Saxena's book will be on the reading list for a new tabloid raj.

Rob Campbell, University of Glamorgan, Wales.