Isn’t it time to stop sabotaging your excellent story with a crappy headline? You write because you have something to say to readers, and it’s discouraging when a thoughtful story sinks without enough interaction. While no magic formula can ensure your story is noticed among the thousands published every month on Daily Kos, you can improve the odds of attracting readers by practicing some basic headline-crafting principles.
Community Spotlight rescues well-written but overlooked stories so they can gain more attention, such as the eleven presented below. We don’t exclude those with uninformative or bland headlines, although we notice that even the best story can struggle to overcome a dud headline because readers don’t know what is under that inauspicious cover. One year ago, I wrote about the value of a compelling headline and asked, “What if you could rescue your own story before it dropped from the top of the front page?”
It’s time to revisit this idea. Week after week, we still see original, thoughtful stories buried under ho-hum headlines. Here are the not-so-secret tips Trending News Managing Editor Jen Hayden shared in the first-ever Community Writing Workshop a few weeks ago to help authors grab readers’ attention and motivate them to click through and read more.