How To Create A News Headline

This paper suggests an explanatory functional characterization of newspaper headlines. Couched within Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory, the paper makes the claim that headlines are designed to optimize the relevance of their stories for their readers: Headlines provide the readers with the optimal ratio between contextual effect and processing effort, and direct readers to construct the optimal context for interpretation. The paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted in the news-desk of one daily newspaper. It shows that the set of intuitive professional imperatives, shared by news-editors and copy-editors, which dictates the choice of headlines for specific stories, can naturally be reduced to the notion of relevance optimization. The analysis explains why the construction of a successful headline requires an understanding of the readers—their state-of-knowledge, their beliefs and expec-tations and their cognitive styles—no less than it requires an understanding of the story. It also explains the fact that skilled newspaper readers spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines—rather than reading the stories. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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On newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers

Daniel Dor*

Department of Communications, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Abstract

This paper suggests an explanatory functional characterization of newspaper headlines.

Couched within Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory, the paper makes the claim that

headlines are designed to optimize the relevance of their stories for their readers: Headlines

provide the readers with the optimal ratio between contextual eﬀect and processing eﬀort, and

direct readers to construct the optimal context for interpretation. The paper presents the

results of an empirical study conducted in the news-desk of one daily newspaper. It shows that

the set of intuitive professional imperatives, shared by news-editors and copy-editors, which

dictates the choice of headlines for speciﬁc stories, can naturally be reduced to the notion of

relevance optimization. The analysis explains why the construction of a successful headline

requires an understanding of the readers—their state-of-knowledge, their beliefs and expec-

tations and their cognitive styles—no less than it requires an understanding of the story. It

also explains the fact that skilled newspaper readers spend most of their reading time scanning

the headlines—rather than reading the stories.

Keywords: Headlines; Relevance theory; Pragmatics; News value; News framing; Media, communication

1. Introduction

This paper is an attempt to suggest an explicit and generalized answer to a very

fundamental question in the study of the mass media, i.e., the question of the com-

municative function of newspaper headlines. The importance of the role of headlines

in the communicative act performed by newspapers can hardly be exaggerated, yet

the nature of this role has virtually never been explicated in the literature. As we

shall see below, the regular strategy adopted in the literature has been to make ﬁne-

grained descriptive distinctions between diﬀerent types of headlines—news headlines

in 'quality newspapers'; news headlines in 'tabloid newspapers'; 'summarizing

Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

PII: S0378-2166(02)00134-0

* Tel.: +972-3–6406521; fax: +972-3-6406032.

E-mail address: danield@post.tau.ac.il (D. Dor).

headlines'; 'localizing headlines', 'quotation headlines', etc.—and assign them dif-

ferent types of communicative functions. In this paper, I will suggest an explanatory

functional deﬁnition of newspaper headlines which attempts to transcend the above

distinctions in type and explain the very fact that newspapers—all types of news-

papers—have headlines in them. The functional deﬁnition to be developed in this

paper relies very heavily on Sperber and Wilson's (1986) technical notion of rele-

vance. Newspaper headlines will be functionally deﬁned as relevance optimizers:

Newspaper headlines are relevance optimizers: They are designed to optimize the

relevance of their stories for their readers.

This functional deﬁnition positions the headline in its appropriate role as a textual

negotiator between the story and its readers. It explains why the construction of a

successful headline requires an understanding of the readers—their state-of-knowl-

edge, their beliefs and expectations and their cognitive styles—no less than it

requires an understanding of the story. It reduces the diﬀerences between the diﬀer-

ent subtypes of headlines mentioned above to a matter of tactical choice: As we shall

see, all the diﬀerent subtypes target the same functional goal , that of relevance

optimization, although they do it in diﬀerent ways.

The literature on newspaper headlines covers a wide range of theoretical and

empirical topics, all the way from the grammar of English headlines to the eﬀects of

headlines on news comprehension and recall.

Surprisingly, however, the literature

dealing directly with the communicative function of headlines is rather sparse. I will

review it in the next section. In Section 3 , I will brieﬂy introduce Sperber and Wil-

son's theory, and then develop the notion of relevance optimization .InSection 4 ,I

will apply the notion of relevance optimization to newspaper headlines. In Section 5,

I will present the results of an empirical study conducted in the news-desk of the

Israeli national newspaper Ma'ariv , where I followed the process of headline pro-

duction from close range.

I will show that the set of intuitive professional impera-

tives, shared by news-editors and copy-editors, which dictates the choice of

headlines for speciﬁc stories, can naturally be reduced to one meta-imperative : Make

the headline such that it renders the story optimally-relevant for the readers. In Section

6, I will apply the relevance-based conception to the analysis of tabloid headlines. In

Section 7, I will deal with the role of the reader in this framework, and show that my

relevance-based theory explains some of the more intriguing behavioral patterns

manifested by newspaper readers—especially the fact that many skilled readers

On headline reading, interpretation and recall, see Henley et al. (1995), Leon (1997), Lindemann

(1989), Perfetti et al. (1987), Pfau (1995) and van Dijk (1988 and references therein); on headline pro-

duction, see Bell (1984, 1991), Fasold (1987) and Chang et al. (1992); on the grammar of headlines, see

Bell (1984), Jenkins (1990) and Mardh (1980); on metaphors in headlines, see de Knop (1985); on head-

lines from a cross-linguistic perspective, see Dierick (1987) and Sidiropoulou (1995).

Between 1996 and 1998, I worked as a senior news-editor and head of the news-desk in Ma'ariv . This

was a period of very intensive participant observation : I was involved in the decision-making process

concerning the formulation of thousands of headlines. The e-mail exchanges which were analyzed for this

paper were randomly collected throughout this period—from other senior editors.

696 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines rather than reading the

stories. In the concluding section, I will sketch some of the larger-scale implications

of my theory, and suggest some directions for further research.

2. Multiple types, multiple functions

Traditionally, newspaper headlines have been functionally characterized as short,

telegram-like summaries of their news items. This is especially true with respect to

news headlines. Van Dijk (1988) couches this traditional insight within his discourse-

analytic framework: ''Each news item in the press has a Headline ... and many have

a Lead, whether marked oﬀ by special printing type or not. We also have an ele-

mentary rule for them: Headline precedes Lead, and together they precede the rest

of the news item. Their structural function is also clear: Together they express the

major topics of the text. That is, they function as an initial summary. Hence, as in

natural stories, we may also introduce the category Summary, dominating Headline

and Lead. The semantic constraint is obvious: Headline+Lead summarize the news

text and express the semantic macrostructure.''

Obviously, some newspaper headlines do provide what seems to be a summary (or

abstract) of their stories, but the general theoretical conception which takes this to

be the essential function of the headline seems to be too narrow, for at least three

complementary reasons. First, even the most prototypical news headlines, those

which appear in what is sometimes called 'quality newspapers', do not always sum-

marize their stories. Some headlines highlight a single detail extracted out of the

story, and others contain a quotation which the editor decided should be promoted

to the foreground. As we shall see below, some headlines even contain material

which does not appear in the news item itself. The fact that headlines do not always

summarize, but sometimes highlight or quote, has been noted by diﬀerent writers.

Bell (1991), for example, makes a distinction between headlines which ''abstract the

main event of the story'', and headlines which ''focus on a secondary event or a

detail'' (p. 188–9). Nir (1993) distinguishes between headlines which function as ''a

summary of the story'' and ''headlines which, rather than summarize the story,

promote one of the details of the story'' (p. 25).

Second, the traditional notion of headlines-as-summaries deﬁnitely does not capture

the function of headlines in more popular newspapers, and especially in tabloids. This

point has been made by diﬀerent writers, most notably by Lindemann (1990). As Lin-

demann shows, tabloid headlines rarely summarize their stories, are not always tele-

gram-like, and in many cases are not even informative. Lindemann discusses the

Note that none of the above writers goes beyond the descriptive labeling of the diﬀerent types of

headlines to suggest explicit theoretical deﬁnitions and explanations. This fact is most clearly demon-

strated by Bernstein and Garst (1982), quoted in Lindemann (1990), who claim that ''... the headline

contains the main highlight of the story. Since it is the most conspicuous part and the part that is read

ﬁrst, the copy editor must present the essence of the news before he goes further''. In this short quotation,

Bernstein and Garst seem to equate the essence of the story with its highlight , thus equating the function

of summarizing with that of highlighting.

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 697

function of tabloid headlines in poetic terms: They present the reader with a ''fairly

complex riddle'', which, ﬁrst, triggers frames and belief systems in the reader's mind,

and, then, gets resolved in the ensuing text. Thus, the following headline,

(1) NO-LA-LA! The Frogs Get Bored with Bed

traps the reader ''in the treadmill of well-established cliches and prejudice'', through

the use of such expressions as frogs , no-la-la and bed , and is then informationally

resolved in the intro: ''The days of the great French lovers are over—froggies just

don't fancy it any more. A third of women and a quarter of men told a nationwide

survey they found bedtime one big yawn''.

Implicit in Lindemann's analysis is the assumption, that the function of tabloid

headlines is so radically diﬀerent from their function in quality newspapers, that the

two cannot be theoretically uniﬁed. As I will show below, the relevance-based ana-

lysis will allow exactly for that—to my mind, a very welcome theoretical result.

The third reason to reject the traditional conception is the simple fact that head-

lines seem to have an additional, pragmatic function, beyond the semantically-

oriented function which is supposed to be captured by the headline-as-summary

analysis. Bell (1991) says that headlines are a ''part of news rhetoric whose function

is to attract the reader'' (p. 189). Nir (1993) claims that the headline has ''to attract

the attention of the reader and provoke the reader to read the whole story''. In a

sophisticated analysis of the semiotics of headlines, Iarovici and Amel (1989)

explicitly contend that the headline has a ''double function'':

''The implicit convention between author and reader regarding the intention of

correlating a text to another text as a headline, and regarding the formal marking

of this quality by a privileged position, concerns the double function of the head-

line: a semantic function , regarding the referential text, and a pragmatic function,

regarding the reader (the receiver) to whom the text is addressed. The two func-

tions are simultaneous, the semantic function being included in and justiﬁed by

the pragmatic function. ... The main function of the headline ... is to alert the

reader (receiver) to the nature or the content of the text. This is the pragmatic

function of the headline, and it includes the semantic one. The headline enables

the reader to grasp the meaning of the text. The headline functions as a

plurality of speech acts (urging, warning, and informing)'' (p. 441–443).

The challenge posed by the above assertions is that of theoretical uniﬁcation. At

least two questions are involved: First, can we functionally deﬁne the headline in a

way which would transcend the above distinctions between the diﬀerent semanti-

cally-oriented functions? In other words, is there a generalized function which sum-

marizing headlines, localizing headlines and quotation headlines have in common?

Second, can we deﬁne the headline in a way which would transcend the distinction

between the above semantic function and the parallel pragmatic function which

698 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

headlines fulﬁll? I would like to claim that this theoretical move becomes possible

once we couch the functional analysis of headlines within the framework of Sperber

and Wilson's (1986) theory of relevance.

3. Relevance theory and relevance optimization

Sperber and Wilson's theory is an attempt to reduce a very complex set of phe-

nomena having to do with communication and interpretation to a very constrained

set of explanatory, cognitive notions. In its essence, the theory is one of cognitive

cost-eﬀectiveness: It claims that human cognitive processes are geared to achieving

the greatest possible cognitive eﬀect for the smallest processing eﬀort. This meta-

principle is incarnated in Sperber and Wilson's technical notion of relevance . Let us

take a look at the fundamental tenets of this framework:

Our starting point is the individual mind : Every individual mentally represents in

his or her mind a huge set of assumptions . Assumptions are propositional entities-

they are the type of entities that can be believed to be true. Our assumptions may

include, among other things, information on the immediate physical environment,

expectations about the future, scientiﬁc hypotheses, religious beliefs, anecdotal

memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs about the personal lives of our

acquaintances, knowledge about politics and history, beliefs about our own emo-

tions, fears and hopes, and so on. Each of the assumptions represented by the indi-

vidual has a ''strength'' for that individual. The strength of the assumption for the

individual is the level of conﬁdence with which the individual holds to the belief that

the assumption is true. The strength of the assumption is a function of its cognitive

processing history. Thus, for example, ''assumptions based on a clear perceptual

experience tend to be very strong; assumptions based on the acceptance of some-

body's word have a strength commensurate with one's conﬁdence in the speaker; the

strength of assumptions arrived at by deduction depends on the strength of the pre-

mises from which they were derived'' (p. 77) Note that the strength of an assumption

for the individual has nothing to do with its objective validity—individuals may have a

very strong belief in assumptions which are totally false, and vice versa.

When an individual hears, or reads, a novel assumption, he or she always inter-

prets it in a context. The notion of context is used here as a psychological construct:

It is a subset of the assumptions which the hearer already represents in his or her

long-term memory. Informally, what the mind of the individual does in the process

of interpretation may be thought of as a comparison of the new assumption with the

subset of assumptions represented in the individual's memory. Sperber and Wilson

name the cognitive apparatus responsible for this process of comparison- ''the

deductive device''. The comparison of the novel assumption with the existing

The general notion of pragmatic relevance, which is not to be equated with Sperber and Wilson's

technical one, plays some role in van Dijk's (1988) analysis of news selection . However, van Dijk does not

make the connection between his notion of relevance and the function of headlines, which he takes to be

summaries of their texts.

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 699

assumptions may have diﬀerent types of outputs : It may turn out, for example, that

the novel assumption already exists in the individual's long term-memory, in which

case it is not new for the individual. Or it may be new, in which case it may either be

in line, or in contradiction with some of the already existing assumptions. If, for

example, the novel assumption contradicts existing assumptions, and if it is strong

enough, the process of comparison will end up with the weakening of the existing

assumptions. In some cases, it may even end up with the erasure of those assump-

tions. If the new information is in line with some existing assumptions, it may serve

to strengthen them some more. Moreover, the union of the new assumption with

some existing assumptions may lead to the deduction of additional assumptions.

Thus, for example, if the individual already represents the assumption that ''whenever

Peter goes to a party, it becomes a success'', and he or she now learns that ''Peter came

to Bill's party'', then the deductive device deduces an additional assumption, namely

that ''Bill's party was a success''. To the extent that the comparison of the new

assumption with the old ones results in a change to the individual's set of prior

assumptions (if it either adds new assumptions, or weakens or strengthens existing

ones), we say that the new information has a contextual eﬀect for the individual.

Now, the following point is crucial: The deductive device does not compare every

novel assumption to the entire set of assumptions represented in the individual's long-

term memory. Doing this would be cognitively impossible. This means that the com-

parison is done with some subset of existing assumptions. This, in turn, raises a very

important question: How does the deductive device choose this subset? Traditionally,

pragmaticists have assumed that the context for the interpretation of an utterance is

simply given: It consists of the immediate environment and the information explicitly

mentioned in the conversation prior to the utterance. Sperber and Wilson ﬂip this

assumption on its head and suggest a radical alternative: They show that the deductive

device has to update the context for the interpretation for each new assumption, and

that the speciﬁc subset of existing assumptions which is chosen for the context is deter-

mined, at least partially, by the content of the new assumption. In cognitive terms, this

means that the order of events in comprehension is reversed: It is not that the deductive

device ﬁrst sets the context, and then interprets the new assumption. On the contrary,

the deductive device has to partially ﬁgure out the meaning of the new assumption,

retrieve a speciﬁc subset of assumptions from long-term memory, store them in its own

short-term memory, and then make the comparison. An example should make this

radical conception rather intuitive. Take a look at the following exchanges:

(2) A: How are you?

B: Not so good, Mary has that ear-infection again, I'm worried.

(3) A: How are you?

B: Great, I just bought the tickets. We're ﬂying to Beijing in exactly four weeks.

In order to interpret B's answer in each of these exchanges, A has to compare

them to a subset of existing assumptions. The proper context in (2) should include

assumptions about the identity of Mary, her relation to B, her medical history, ear-

700 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

infections, and so on and so forth. The proper context in (3) should include

assumptions about B's travel plans, the identity of her companion, or companions,

whatever assumptions A has about Beijing, and so on and so forth. Obviously, these

assumptions are not stored in A's short-term memory on a permanent basis. A's

deductive device has to retrieve these assumptions from long-term memory, and

only then make the comparison and deduce the contextual eﬀects.

We may now make two parallel cognitive assumptions regarding the process I

have described. First, we may assume that in its appropriate context, a new piece of

information has a certain number of contextual eﬀects, which, at least theoretically,

can be counted. Practically speaking, when we deal with interpretations of actual

utterances by real people, we do not know exactly how to make the measurement,

but the idea itself is intuitive enough for us to accept. We may be pretty certain that

in diﬀerent contexts, the same piece of information may yield diﬀerent amounts of

contextual eﬀects, and that in the same context, some pieces of information would

yield more contextual eﬀects than others.

Second, we may assume that the work of the deductive device involves some

mental eﬀort , which—theoretically speaking, again- may be measured.

Other things

being equal, for example, the computation of a more complex piece of information

will take more eﬀort than the computation of a simpler one. Moreover, the con-

struction of a new context for interpretation also involves some mental eﬀort: To the

extent that the interpretation of the novel piece of information necessitates the

retrieval of a larger set of assumptions from long-term memory, the mental eﬀort

involved in the interpretation process would be greater.

The measurements of contextual eﬀect and mental eﬀort constitute the basis of

Sperber and Wilson's notion of relevance:

(4) Relevance for an individual (p. 145):

a. An assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent that the contextual

eﬀects achieved when it is optimally processed are large.

b. An assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent that the eﬀort

required to process it optimally is small.

It is crucial to understand that this is not a deﬁnition of relevance in some objec-

tive sense, but a claim concerning the way our minds make relevance judgments

about new assumptions: We consider new assumptions to be relevant if they carry a

contextual eﬀect at a reasonable cognitive price. We judge new assumptions to be

irrelevant if they do not carry a contextual eﬀect, or if the computation of the con-

textual eﬀect entails too much of a mental eﬀort. Note that this is a comparative,

gradual conception of relevance, rather than a binary one: New assumptions are not

either relevant or not; they are more or less relevant than others, in diﬀerent con-

texts, for diﬀerent people. Thus, for example, a regular newspaper reader will prob-

Sperber and Wilson (1986, p. 130) conceptualize about the measurement of contextual eﬀects and

cognitive eﬀort in terms of physico-chemical changes which occur in the brain as a result of the processing

of the contextual eﬀects.

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 701

ably judge a piece of local news to be more relevant than a piece of foreign news

because (i) the potential contextual eﬀect derivable from the local news would

probably be larger; and (ii) the eﬀort needed to interpret the foreign news (especially

in terms of the retrieval of the appropriate set of assumptions from long-term

memory) would probably be larger. This judgment need not be made consciously;

the reader may simply skip the foreign-news page, or note that 'foreign news is

boring'. Note, however, that the very same reader may take the trouble to read the

foreign news to the extent that their contextual eﬀects would be worth his or her

processing eﬀort. This may be the case, for example, if the story is about a country

which the reader intends to visit; if some people which the reader knows are there; if

there is a local angle to the foreign story; if the foreign story has a global con-

sequence which is felt locally, and so on.

Finally, note that this technical notion of relevance should not be equated with

relevance in the ordinary sense of the word. Relevance in this ordinary sense may be

thought of as the measurement of the association, or congruence, between some

content and its context of interpretation. Thus, a news story will be relevant in this

sense to the extent that it is about those issues which are directly related to the

readers' lives and interests. Indeed, relevance in this sense may play a role in news

value judgments. Note, however, that a story may be relevant in this ordinary sense

but very low on relevance in the technical sense (if it is long and complicated to read,

for example, or if it does not carry a lot of new information); and it may be irrele-

vant in the ordinary sense, but high on relevance in the technical sense- if its poten-

tial contextual eﬀects justify the construction of a new context for interpretation.

Now, our technical deﬁnition of relevance is addressee-oriented, but it may actu-

ally tell us something of importance about the role of speakers in communicative

contexts. Think about a speaker, Ann, who is trying to tell her addressee, John, a

story. Being a cooperative communicator, Ann would like to make the story as rele-

vant for John as possible. How should she go about achieving this goal? According to

relevance theory, she has three principled strategies which she can try to adopt:

(i) First, Ann can try to compress the largest possible number of new assump-

tions (those which are new for John ) into her story: Other things being equal,

the more new assumptions the story contains, the more contextual eﬀects it

may have for John. In the worst-case scenario, the story will not contain any

assumptions which are new for John, in which case he is going to ﬁnd it

totally irrelevant. Ann deﬁnitely needs to ﬁnd a way to do better than that. In

the best-case scenario, on the other hand, the story will contain a very large

number of new assumptions. As we shall see below, this is not always going

to be possible.

(ii) Second, Ann can try to minimize John's processing eﬀort: Other things being

equal, the smaller the eﬀort he has to put in, the greater the relevance of the

story is going to be for him. In the worst-case scenario, the story is going to

be too long and complicated, and John is going to lose interest. Ann deﬁ-

nitely has to avoid that. In the best-case scenario, on the other hand, the

702 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

story will take a very minimal eﬀort to process. Again, this is not always

going to be possible.

(iii) Third, Ann can try to manipulate the context in which John is going to

interpret her story. Other things being equal, the closer the context of inter-

pretation is to the optimal one, the more contextual eﬀects the story is going

to carry for John. (Note that in regular conversation we regularly take the

trouble to manipulate our addressee's context of interpretation, especially

when we wish to ''change the topic of conversation'': We say things like 'Oh,

I wanted to tell you something about Bill', or 'talking about school, did you

hear about Bill's exam?'). In the worst-case scenario, John is going to try to

interpret Ann's story in the wrong context, and the interpretation is going to

yield no contextual eﬀects. In the best-case scenario, the story is going to be

interpreted in the most appropriate context, yielding the maximal amount of

contextual eﬀects. This, again, is not always going to be possible.

Now, it is very important to realize that the three strategies mentioned above are

not only completely intertwined , but are also in direct competition with each other.

This is why achieving the maximal results associated with each of the strategies is

not always possible. This is so for the following reasons:

(i) First, every new assumption which the speaker adds to the story does not

only contribute to the overall number of contextual eﬀects- it also adds to the

overall processing eﬀort. Thus, the new assumption adds to the overall rele-

vance of the story only to the extent that it clearly adds more contextual eﬀect

than processing eﬀort. To the extent that the new assumption adds more to

the processing eﬀort than to the contextual eﬀect, it actually reduces the

overall relevance of the story. In this case, more information results in less

relevance. So, the attempt to maximize relevance simply by maximizing the

amount of new information is bound to end up in failure. The speaker has to

ﬁgure out the optimal amount of information which would not result in rele-

vance reduction due to processing eﬀort.

(ii) Second, Ann may deﬁnitely try to maximally reduce John's processing eﬀort

by making her story short, simple and clear, but this reduction will not

necessarily result in maximal relevance: This is so, because the reduction in

the story's complexity characteristically reduces the number of its potential

contextual eﬀects. The reduction of processing eﬀort will enhance the rele-

vance of Ann's story only to the extent that the amount of eﬀort saved is

larger than the amount of contextual eﬀects lost. So, again, Ann cannot

simply reduce John's processing eﬀort to the minimum. She has to ﬁgure out

the optimal amount of eﬀort which would not result in relevance reduction

due to loss of contextual eﬀects.

(iii) Third, the number of contextual eﬀects which John may deduce from Ann's

story is not just a function of the sheer number of new assumptions in the

story, but a function of the interaction between these new assumptions and

the context of interpretation. This means that Ann should not just provide

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 703

John with the optimal number of new assumptions, but also take care to

provide him with those speciﬁc assumptions which would yield the maximal

amount of contextual eﬀects in the appropriate context, and at the very same

time direct John to construct that speciﬁc context. This complicates our rele-

vance considerations to a considerable extent, because the construction of the

appropriate context entails a signiﬁcant amount of processing eﬀort. Conse-

quently, in principle, the construction of the appropriate context may even-

tually result in relevance reduction due to the increase in processing eﬀort.

Thus, the construction of a partial context for interpretation may sometimes

be the optimal strategy.

As we have seen, Ann's role as the story-teller is going to be that of relevance

optimization: She will need to provide John with the optimal ratio of contextual

eﬀect and processing eﬀort. This, I would like to claim, is exactly the generalized

communicative function which newspaper headlines are supposed to fulﬁll: They are

designed to optimize the relevance of their stories for their readers.

4. Newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers

Consider the following story, from the Israeli national newspaper Ma'ariv:

(5) The bodies of John Kennedy Jr., his wife Caroline and his sister-in-law

Lorraine were discovered yesterday in the ocean, at a depth of 30 meters, 10

kilometers away from Martha's Vineyard Island, where they were headed on

Saturday. Senator Edward Kennedy, John's uncle, arrived at the site where the

bodies were found, in order to identify them. Kennedy Jr. will be buried in NY

in the coming days.

This news item requires a certain amount of mental eﬀort to interpret. To begin

with, the paragraph requires some eﬀort to read: It consists of about 70 words, and

is grammatically fairly complex. Moreover, the news item requires the construction

of a context for interpretation- one which includes whatever the reader knows about

John Kennedy Jr., his family, their disappearance two days before, the relevant

geography, and probably at least something about the Kennedys' history. As we

have said before, the construction of this context takes an additional eﬀort. Let us

assume, for the sake of simplicity, that the interpretation of the entire story will

require the ordinary reader to invest a certain amount of eﬀort, let us dub it

E(story). Now, to the extent that the reader manages to construct the appropriate

context and read the passage, the story carries a certain amount of contextual

eﬀects: It changes a lot of factual assumptions the reader represented in his or her

long-term memory (e.g., the assumption 'John Kennedy Jr. is alive and well' is

replaced by 'John Kennedy Jr. died in an airplane accident'), and it changes, weak-

ens or strengthens a great many related assumptions having to do with, for example,

the inescapable tragedies of the Kennedy family, the life-styles of the rich and

704 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

famous, the blindness of fate, the risks involved in ﬂying your own plane, and so on

and so forth. Obviously, diﬀerent readers will probably deduce diﬀerent sets of

contextual eﬀects from the story, but for the sake of simplicity, let us assume that

the ordinary reader will deduce a certain amount of contextual eﬀects, let us dub it

C(story). The relevance of the story for the ordinary reader will thus be:

R(story)=C(story)/E(story).

Now, let us take a look at the headline the newspaper gave to the story:

(6) John Kennedy Jr.'s body found

How much eﬀort does the reader have to invest in interpreting the headline?

Obviously, much less than E(story): The headline is a single, short and simple sen-

tence, comprising ﬁve words, and the eﬀort needed to read it is insubstantial. The

eﬀort needed to construct the context for the interpretation of the headline is also

signiﬁcantly smaller—the reader does not need to retrieve the sets of assumptions

having to do with the geography of the story, with Senator Ed Kennedy, and so on.

For the sake of simplicity, let us make the arbitrary assumption that E(headline)

equals 10% of E(story).

Now, how many contextual eﬀects can the reader deduce from the headline? Sur-

prisingly, when the headline is interpreted in its reduced context, a signiﬁcantly large

subset of the contextual eﬀects of the entire story survive. Obviously, some things

are missing—for example, the fact that Kennedy's wife and his sister-in-law were

found too—but Kennedy's death, its signiﬁcance within the tragic history of the

Kennedy family, and the more general implications of the story are clear contextual

eﬀects of the headline. Let us adopt a conservative estimate: For the ordinary

reader, C(headline) equals 50% of C(story). As a simple calculation clearly shows,

our estimates entail that the headline multiplies the relevance of the story by ﬁve (!).

It saves much more on the processing eﬀort than it loses on the contextual eﬀects.

This is exactly what a headline should do. A short and simple text, it optimizes the

relevance of the story by minimizing processing eﬀort while making sure that a suf-

ﬁcient amount of contextual eﬀects are deducible within the most appropriate con-

text possible. Just like Ann, our story-teller, the headline does not adopt an all-or-

none strategy of either reducing processing eﬀort to zero, or maximizing new infor-

mation, or constructing the most appropriate context for interpretation. Rather, it

attempts to optimize the ratio between processing eﬀort and contextual eﬀects- and

thus optimally negotiate between the story and the ordinary reader.

Note that for the optimization of relevance to be successful, the right material

should be chosen for the headline. Consider, for example, the following three clauses

as alternative headlines for the Kennedy story:

(7) a. Caroline Kennedy's body found

b. Sen. Edward Kennedy arrived at the crash site.

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 705

c. The bodies of John Kennedy Jr. and his wife Caroline were discovered

yesterday in the ocean, near Martha's Vineyard Island.

The ﬁrst two alternative headlines (7a and 7b) are probably as easy to read as the

actual one, and we may assume that they require the construction of a very similar

context for interpretation. However, they do not carry the same amount of con-

textual eﬀects as the original. The third alternative (7c) carries a slightly larger

number of contextual eﬀects than the original, but it very obviously requires much

more processing eﬀort. Thus, all three alternative fall short of providing optimal

relevance.

Is the original headline in (6) a summarizing or a highlighting headline? It is hard

to tell. The important point, however, is that from our theoretical point-of-view the

summarizing-highlighting distinction is simply not that crucial: Summarizing the

story is just one tactical approach to relevance optimization. Highlighting the most

intriguing aspect of the story, or reproducing the most interesting statement quoted

in the story, may have the very same result. It may turn out, for example, that the

quotation or the highlighted aspect carry more contextual eﬀects than the summary

of the whole narrative. In this case, the rational thing to do would be to promote

them to the headline- and thus optimize the relevance of the story for the readers.

The choice between these diﬀerent tactical approaches is in part a matter of the

editorial style of the newspaper, and to a very large extent a matter of the experience

and creativity of its editors. For every given story, some headline options are going

to suggest themselves. The editor may opt for a summarizing headline, a high-

lighting headline or a quotation headline- depending on which type of headline will

provide optimal relevance.

Moreover, the editor may manipulate the length and

complexity of the headline, and its speciﬁc contents. And again, these manipu-

lations, to a very large extent, are going to be relevance-oriented.

In the following section, I will present the results of an empirical study conducted

in the years 1996–1998 in the news-desk of the Israeli national newspaper Ma'ariv.

In the study, I followed the decision-making process leading to the choice of head-

line for a large number of news items. As the results of the study clearly indicate, the

set of professional intuitions shared by the editors, concerning the properties of the

'right' or 'appropriate' headline, are theoretically reduced to our notion of rele-

I will discuss the choice of tabloid-type headlines later on.

An anonymous referee notes that some text manipulations may not be relevance-oriented. Thus, for

example, some manipulations may have to do with spacing on the page, and others with political con-

siderations. I agree with the ﬁrst point. In Dor (2001), however, I show that relevance-oriented manipu-

lations play an extremely important role in processes of political framing.

There are currently three national newspapers in Israel: Yediot Ahronot and Ma'ariv are considered

to be the popular newspapers, whereas Ha'aretz is considered to be the quality, high-brow one. Yediot

Ahronot and Ma'ariv, however, are not tabloids in the regular, American-European sense. They contain a

variety of ''serious'' news items which is not that diﬀerent from that of Ha'aretz , and are distinct from it

especially in writing style and graphic design. In all three newspapers, headline formulation is considered

part of the editorial process, and reporters do not formulate headlines for their stories.

706 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

vance: The most appropriate headline for a news item is the one which optimizes the

relevance of the story for the readers of the newspaper.

5. The notion of relevance and the art of headline writing

In general, news editors do not work with a very explicit deﬁnition of what head-

lines are, or of their communicative functions. What they do work with is a cluster

of professional intuitions—gradually developed 'in the ﬁeld', and never seriously

explicated—concerning the properties of what we might call, rather informally, the

'right', 'appropriate', or 'good' headline. When asked to provide an explicit deﬁni-

tion of what a headline is, senior newspaper editors usually give an answer of the

type: 'I don't know what headlines are, but I can tell a good one when I see it'. This

answer is actually a pretty accurate rendition of a very fundamental sentiment:

Professional knowledge is practical, not theoretical. However, when presented with

a news-item, and asked to choose a headline out of a set of alternatives, experienced

news editors do so with extreme ease and eﬃciency. Moreover, senior editors in the

same newspaper have a very high rate of agreement on the preferred headline. This

means that experienced news editors know a great deal more about the functional

properties of headlines than they ever explicate. In this sense, headline production is

more similar to an artistic activity than, say, to the practice of an exact science.

This aﬃnity with the arts is very clearly reﬂected in the trial-and-error process

which beginning copy-editors go through as part of their on-the-job training proce-

dure. Rather than receive their professional education in the form of explicit lectur-

ing, beginning copy-editors in Ma'ariv simply start out working: They are assigned a

new-item, and are asked to rewrite it and suggest a headline for it. The result is then

reviewed by the senior editor in charge, who, in most cases, rejects the suggested

headline and writes a diﬀerent one, which eventually gets published. Sometimes, the

copy-editor is asked to suggest the alternative headline, which is, again, reviewed by

the editor in charge. Deadline pressure usually does not allow for long explanations:

When the process is over, the copy-editor gets another story, suggests a headline,

which usually gets rejected, and so on and so forth. This process goes on for years,

and in a real sense never ends: In Ma'ariv, each and every suggested headline is sent

to the senior editor in chief, in the form of an electronic message, to be approved or

rejected, even if the copy-editors have years of experience behind them. Obviously,

the rate of rejected headlines goes down with time, when the trained editor inter-

nalizes the set of implicit intuitions shared by the other, more experienced editors,

but even very experienced editors get some of their headlines rejected some of the

time: Sometimes, for example, the editor in chief knows something about the wider

context of the story which the copy-editor was not aware of.

The fact that these real-time negotiations about the headlines are done in writing,

by e-mail messages, allowed me to follow the process of headline formulation from

very close range. I collected 134 e-mail exchanges, concerning 134 news-items, and

analyzed the semantic-pragmatic diﬀerences between the rejected and approved

headlines. In some cases, I asked the editor in charge to reconstruct the reasons for

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 707

the rejection of the suggested headline. I then extracted a list of ten properties, which

I shall call the properties of the appropriate headline . I submit that this list is an

accurate rendition of the set of implicit intuitions shared by experienced news editors

in Ma'ariv . In the following section, I will present the ten properties, each with its

representative example, and show that the list is actually reducible to one professional

meta-imperative: Make the headline such that it renders the story optimally-relevant.

Three notes should be made at this point: First, the following discussion should

not be thought of as an attempt to construct a theoretical framework, but as a

description of a set of professional intuitions , shared by news editors, concerning the

properties of the ''appropriate headline''. In other words, I do not intend to make

any signiﬁcant claim concerning the theoretical status of the ten properties to be

discussed below. Quite obviously, some of the properties seem to bear close resem-

blance to some principles discussed in the literature under the rubric of news value

(e.g., in Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Bell, 1991); other properties may remind the

reader of Grice's conversational maxims. I will leave the elaboration of these

resemblances for further research, and concentrate on the possibility of reducing the

entire set of properties to the relevance-based meta-intuition mentioned above.

Second, the properties are to be thought of as default conditions , rather than obli-

gatory ones. It is not the case that every headline should have all 10 properties. It is

the case that a headline which meets any of these conditions is better than a headline

which does not, and a headline which meets a larger number of the conditions is

better than a headline which meets a smaller number of them. Thus, for example, the

ﬁrst property—'headlines should be as short as possible'—should be read as saying:

'other things being equal , a shorter headline is better than a longer one'.

Finally, The headlines presented in the next section are translated from the

Hebrew original. I chose to keep the translation as literally accurate as possible, and

avoided translating the headlines into ''headlinese'', because Hebrew headlines do

not usually have the telegraphic syntax characteristic of English headlines.

5.1. The properties of the ''appropriate headline''

[1] ''Headlines should be as short as possible''. Newspaper headlines are, quite

obviously, very short clauses. The actual length of each particular headline, however, is

a matter of considerable debate and negotiation between senior editors and copy edi-

tors: Copy-editors, especially the beginners, suggest longer headlines, attempting to

'capture' as much of the story as possible. The senior editors shorten the headlines to a

considerable extent- leaving out whole chunks of information. One of the expertises

mastered by experienced editors is the ability to decide which parts of the story should

be left out of the headline. The following exchange is a very typical example. The

I thank an anonymous referee for his/her discussion of this point. The referee also wondered whether

any of the ten properties may be reducible to another. Thus, for example, the referee felt that properties

[6] and [7] are mirror-images of each other, and should thus be put together. I assume that this can indeed

be done. For me, however, the more important point was that the editors I talked to felt these were two

separate, although obviously related, principles. As I am interested here in the description of intuitions,

rather than in the construction of a theoretical framework, I will discuss the two principles separately.

708 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

story is about a youth gang which was caught red-handed mutilating gravestones in a

military cemetery in Haifa. The copy-editor suggested the following headline:

(8) Haifa: A youth gang

was caught mutilating

gravestones in the

city's military cemetery

The head of the news-desk ordered the copy-editor to shorten the headline, in the

following way:

(9) Haifa: A youth gang was

caught mutilating gravestones

Note that the decision to shorten the headline is not without its price: We have

lost a piece of information, i.e., that the gravestones were mutilated in a military

cemetery, which means we have lost some contextual eﬀects. We have, however,

gained in reading eﬀort. The shorter headline is simply easier to read. This is a very

clear example of relevance optimization by eﬀort reduction. The editor in charge

decided that the loss in contextual eﬀects is smaller than the gain in reading eﬀort.

[2] ''Headlines should be clear, easy to understand, and unambiguous''. For-

mulating a headline to a complex story is not an easy task. Copy-editors sometimes

suggest headlines which come out unclear, diﬃcult to understand, or unintentionally

ambiguous. Such headlines are rejected, and the copy-editor is asked to formulate a

clearer, simpler, unambiguous headline. In the following example, the article tells

the story of a police drama in the city of Ramat-Gan, where a single arsonist

threatened the city for weeks, burning down vehicles every night. On that speciﬁc

night, the police caught a suspect, but had to release him after the 'real' arsonist

took out to the streets again, burning down more vehicles to prove that he was not

caught. The copy-editor suggested the following headline:

(10) The 'real arsonist' from Ramat-Gan

proves: You Haven't caught me

The headline was rejected because it was considered unclear and unnecessarily

ambiguous. It raises more questions and vaguenesses than it actually answers: Who

is the 'real arsonist'? Is there an 'unreal arsonist'? How has the 'real arsonist' proven

that he wasn't caught? By whom? The copy-editor was ordered to formulate a

clearer headline. This was his second attempt:

(11) The arsonist 'was caught'- and the

vehicles in Ramat-Gan went on burning

This version is much clearer: It makes clear that a claim was made that the arso-

nist was caught, which turned out to be false, and it makes clear that, on that day,

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 709

after the capture incident ended, some vehicles in Ramat-Gan were still burning.

There is, however, a potential ambiguity here: The headline can be read as making

the claim that the arsonist set the vehicles on ﬁre before the police made the false

claim, and that they went on burning after the incident. The headline was rejected

again, and the copy-editor suggested the third version, in (12), which was ﬁnally

accepted and published as it is. Note that the only diﬀerence between (11), the rejected

headline, and (12), the approved one, is in the tense of the verb in the second clause.

(12) The arsonist 'was caught'- and the

vehicles in Ramat-Gan go on burning

This headline makes it clear that the arsonist is still on the loose, and is still in the

habit of setting vehicles on ﬁre. Finally, the story is captured in a clear, simple and

unambiguous fashion. This reduces processing eﬀort to the necessary minimum—

and optimizes the relevance of the story.

[3] ''Headlines should be interesting''. This quality plays a central role in the

negotiations between copy-editors and senior editors. Many suggested headlines are

rejected on the grounds that they are 'not interesting'. What is usually meant by this

rather obscure phrase is that the editor imagines that the readers of the paper will

not ﬁnd the headline interesting enough. In terms of our relevance-based theory, this

means that the editor estimates that the amount of contextual eﬀects carried by the

headline will not justify the amount of reading eﬀort. The copy-editor is then asked

to read the article again, and look for a 'more interesting' piece of information to

foreground to the headline. In the following example, the story includes an interview

with Uri Lubrani, IDF's Chief of Military Operations in Southern Lebanon. Gen-

eral Antoin Lahed, who is mentioned in the rejected headline, is the Commander in

Chief of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), a Christian Militia which has traditionally

been IDF's ally in Lebanon. The context of the story is a wave of rumors, according

to which the IDF plans to withdraw from Southern Lebanon, thus leaving General

Lahed and his people on their own against their Islamic rivals:

This is the headline which the copy-editor suggested:

(13) Lubrani: 'There was no secret

meeting with General Lahed'

Whether or not there was a secret meeting between IDF oﬃcials and General Lahed

on the previous day is hardly an interesting question. After all, IDF oﬃcials and

General Lahed meet on a regular basis, and their meetings are usually kept secret. In

our terms, the headline does not carry a substantial amount of contextual eﬀects. The

headline was rejected, and the copy-editor came up with the following alternative:

(14) Lubrani: 'There is no plan to

evacuate SLA seniors to Europe'

Whether or not there is a secret plan to evacuate SLA seniors to Europe is very

obviously much more interesting. If there was such a plan, this would be a pretty

710 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

remarkable sign that the IDF is on its way out of Lebanon. Lubrani's ﬂat denial can

be interpreted in more than one way: We can take him for his word, or assume that

he chose to deny the existence of the plan for tactical reasons- at any rate the denial

has interesting implications. It is deﬁnitely more interesting than just another meet-

ing- in our terms, it carries more contextual eﬀects for the same amount of proces-

sing eﬀort. Note that this is a very good example of the signiﬁcant role of headline

writing in the workings of a newspaper. The two headlines, the rejected one and the

suggested one, make it quite obvious that the Lubrani interview did not contain any

remarkable scoops, and that the editor had to dig in to ﬁnd something which was

worth promoting to the headline. As the senior editor's decision makes clear, even

negative statements, ﬂat denials of the type that Lubrani suggested as answers to the

reporter's questions, have diﬀerent amounts of relevance, and the one which was

more relevant than the other was promoted.

[4] ''Headlines should contain new information''. A major topic for negotiations

between copy-editors and senior-editors has to do with the question of whether the

readers already know what the copy-editor decided to promote to the headline.

Obviously, editors do not really know what their readers know, but their estimates

of their readers' state of knowledge play a central role in the decision-making pro-

cess. This makes perfect sense within our relevance-based framework: A headline

which does not contain novel assumptions cannot bring about contextual eﬀects,

and is thus irrelevant. In Ma'ariv , as in any other daily newspaper, estimates of the

readers' state of knowledge are based primarily on what has already been commu-

nicated by the other mass-media, especially the evening news on TV. If the content

of the proposed headline for the next morning has already appeared in the news the

night before, most chances are it will be rejected. The following headline, for exam-

ple, was rejected on these grounds:

(15) The Austrian Chancellor

Arrived for a visit; will

meet Netanyahu today

The copy-editor had a hard time ﬁnding an alternative headline. This is what he

came up with:

(16) Oﬃcials in Jerusalem hope

for the Austrian Chancellor's

visit to run smoothly

This headline was accepted, for two reasons: First, it carries the implication that

oﬃcials in Jerusalem are worried that the visit might not run smoothly—an angle on

the visit which was new. Second, it connects the story to prior events and expecta-

tions: The visit of the British foreign minister had just ended the day before, and that

visit was full of political hurdles and diplomatic embarrassments. As we shall see

below, connecting a story to its wider context is another important property of good

headlines.

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 711

[5] ''Headlines should not presuppose information unknown to the readers''. This

principle, in a sense, is the mirror-image of the previous one: The information in the

headline should deﬁnitely be new—but it cannot be 'overly new'. Headlines should

only presuppose information which is already part of the mutual knowledge estab-

lished between the newspaper and its readers. In terms of our relevance-based fra-

mework, every presupposition in the headline should already be available within the

readers' context of interpretation. Otherwise, the computation of the headline will

result in zero contextual eﬀects.

Consider, then, the following headline:

(17) Advanced negotiations on the establishment

of the second Israeli-owned casino in Jericho

This headline presupposes the existence, or at least the potential existence, of the

ﬁrst Israeli-owned casino in Jericho. The ﬁrst news concerning the plans to build this

casino, the ﬁrst one, were published only a few days before the above headline was

suggested. According to the editor in chief, the readers had not yet registered the

future existence of the ﬁrst casino in their long-term memory—it was premature to

treat it as a presupposition. The copy-editor was asked to change the headline, and

came up with the following alternative:

(18) The ﬁrst casino in Jericho

will be operational in February

In this headline, the establishment of the ﬁrst casino in Jericho is not presupposed,

but reported as part of the news. This is much better. But the editor in chief asked

the copy-editor to rephrase the headline again, this time for a diﬀerent reason: The

proposed headline forces the reader to calculate the amount of time it will take till the

casino will be operational. This adds to the processing eﬀort. The alternative, which was

eventually published, reduces this eﬀort, thus optimizing the relevance of the story:

(19) The ﬁrst casino in Jericho

will be operational in a year

[6] ''Headlines should include names and concepts with high 'news value' for the

readers''.

Experienced editors develop a sense of the 'news value' of names and

This property, and the next one, reminded one anonymous referee of Ariel's (1988, 1991) accessibility

theory (see also Kronrod and Engel 2000). The resemblance, however, is rather superﬁcial. Ariel is not

interested in the speciﬁc contents of the referring expressions, but in their general cognitive and structural

properties. Thus, for example, referring expressions which function as high accessibility markers (e.g.,

personal pronouns, ﬁrst names) are used by speakers when they assume that the referents are highly

accessible for their addressees; lower accessibility markers (e.g., long deﬁnite descriptions, full names etc.)

are used when the speaker assumes low mental accessibility for their addressees. The point I am making

here, however, is not that newspaper editors prefer certain types of referring expression (e.g., full names)

to others (e.g., last names), but that they prefer certain referents (e.g., famous ﬁgures) to others.

712 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

concepts: They very easily identify names and concepts which should appear in

headlines- and those which do not. In terms of our relevance-based theory, experi-

enced editors know, or at least believe they know, which names and concepts will

carry a large number of contextual eﬀects for their readers. The following example

demonstrates this very clearly. Some background: Two days before the following

story was to be published, a story in one of the national newspapers revealed that

the popular musicians contracted to perform in Israel's 50

Jubilee were paid high

sums of money- at the tax-payers' expense. In our story, some other popular musi-

cians reacted to the revelation and angrily declared that they were willing to perform

in the Jubilee for free. This was the headline suggested by the copy-editor:

(20) A group of artists suggests

an alternative for the Jubilee:

''we are willing to perform for free''

This headline, a classic summarizing headline, was rejected in favor of the fol-

lowing, which replaces the expression 'a group of artists' with the names of two

celebrity musicians, Shimi Tavori and Margalit Tsan'ani:

(21) Shimi Tavori and Margalit

Tsan'ani: ''we are willing to

perform in the jubilee for free''

Note, ﬁrst, that the replacement headline in (21) actually loses some of the infor-

mation we had in (20): The group of artists included many more musicians than just

the two mentioned in (21). The point, however, is that the two are the most famous

members of the group, and names of well-known popular musicians always carry a

lot of contextual eﬀects: This is so, because their names direct the readers to con-

struct a much wider context for interpretation, which includes whatever we know

about them , their personalities, their views, their social background, their wealth,

their life styles, and so on. (20) is a headline suited for a regular news story about the

Jubilee; (21), on the other hand, is a headline for what is basically a gossip story

about Shimi Tavori and Margalit Tsan'ani.

[7] ''Headlines should not contain names and concepts with low 'news value' for

the readers''. This is the mirror-image of the last property: Some names and con-

cepts do not have ''news value'' for the readers, and experienced editors avoid pro-

moting them to the headline. In our terms, these names and concepts do not help the

reader construct the optimal context for the interpretation of the headline. In the

following example, the copy-editor attempted to promote such a name to the head-

line, and was intercepted by the editor in charge. Some background: The story has

to do with an accident in which two military helicopters collided in the air on their

way to Israel's northern border, an accident in which more than 70 soldiers were

killed. New immigrants to Israel receive an immigration grant from the Jewish

agency, and it turned out that the agency asked the parents of one of the soldiers

killed in the accident, a newly-arrived immigrant, to pay back his grant. The copy

editor suggested the following headline:

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 713

(22) The Michaelov family was ordered

to return the immigration grant given

to their son- who was killed in the Galilee

The editor in charge rejected the headline, and ordered the copy-editor to produce

another one, which would not contain the name. This was the alternative headline,

which was ﬁnally published:

(23) The Jewish agency refused to let

a family, whose son was killed in the

helicopter accident, keep his immigration grant

Note that the move from the deﬁnite 'the Michaelov family' to the indeﬁnite 'a

family' made it diﬃcult for the copy-editor to keep it in subject position, and dic-

tated an overall grammatical change from passive to active voice.

[8] ''Headlines should 'connect' the story to previously known facts and events''.

Just like the last two principles, this one has to do with the construction of the

appropriate context for interpretation. A story interpreted on its own, as an isolated

event, will carry a certain amount of contextual eﬀects. The same story can carry

more contextual eﬀects to the extent that the readers interprets it within a wider

context, which includes previously known facts and events. Consider the following

example, which is a report on a violent taxi robbery in the city of Haifa:

(24) The driver was beaten

and thrown out- and

the stolen taxi was later

found stuck in the mud

The editor in charge, who rejected this headline, asked the copy-editor to connect

the incident in Haifa to the rising trend of taxi robbery throughout Israel. The fol-

lowing headline, which connects the speciﬁc incident in Haifa to the new criminal

pattern, directs the reader to construct a context for interpretation which includes the

former robberies, and promises to carry more contextual eﬀects in this wider context:

(25) Another taxi robbery:

A driver from Haifa was

attacked and thrown out

of the vehicle

[9] ''Headlines should 'connect the story' to prior expectations and assumptions''.

Just as headlines have to connect the story to previously known facts and events,

they have to connect the story to non-factual mental representations, i.e., prior

expectations and assumptions which the readers may have with respect to the rele-

vant topic. To the extent that the headline manages to do that, it helps the readers

construct a context for interpretation in which more contextual eﬀects will be

714 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

deduced. The following example needs no background: It has to do with one of the

stages of the Lewinsky aﬀair. This is the headline suggested by the copy-editor:

(26) Clinton plans to admit that

he kissed Monica Lewinsky

The editor in charge rejected the headline, and asked the copy-editor to suggest a

headline which connects the story to the common assumptions and expectations which

readers at that time had with respect to the story: The really important question was

whether Clinton was about to admit to intercourse, not to kisses, with Lewinsky, and

the assumption was that such a move on Clinton's behalf would constitute a very dra-

matic turning point in the whole aﬀair, potentially leading to Clinton's impeachment.

Connecting the story to this set of assumptions and expectations helps the reader to

construct a more appropriate context for interpretation, and thus deduce a larger

number of contextual eﬀects. This is the headline which was ﬁnally published:

(27) Clinton plans to admit to

kisses- not to intercourse

Note that this headline does not contain any additional positive information: It

merely explicates what the reader may have ﬁgured out from (26) by implicature. What

it does do is position the story within its proper context, thus optimizing its relevance.

[10] ''Headlines should 'frame' the story in an appropriate fashion''. Many of the

negotiations between senior editors and copy-editors have to do with the proper

framing of the story. The characteristic question is: What kind of story is this? Is

this, for example, a politics-oriented story, a human interest story, an entertainment

story? As everybody who has ever worked with journalistic materials knows, the

answer to these questions does not lie in the objective world, but in the construction

of the story by its writer and editor. The following example has to do with the heli-

copter accident mentioned above. The copyeditor initially framed the story as a

military-oriented story:

(28) The defense ministry decided:

The word 'disaster' will not be

written on the gravestones of

the victims of the helicopter accident

The editor in charge rejected this headline and asked the copy-editor to frame the

story as a human interest one. According to the senior editor, framing the story as a

human interest story would make it 'more interesting'—in our terms, it would help

the reader construct a context for interpretation where the story would carry more con-

textual eﬀects for the same processing eﬀort. This is what the copy-editor came up with:

(29) The parents' request was denied:

The word 'disaster' will not be

written on the gravestones of

the victims of the helicopter accident

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 715

To sum up: The above list of properties constitutes an accurate rendition of the set

of implicit professional imperatives shared by senior editors in Ma'ariv . As we have

seen, each of these properties is reducible to a relevance-oriented strategy. Headlines

can optimize relevance by requiring the minimal amount of processing eﬀort -by

being short, clear, unambiguous and easy to read. Headlines can optimize relevance

by carrying the maximal amount of contextual eﬀects - by being interesting and new.

Headlines can optimize relevance by making sure the readers construct the right

context for interpretation, and by making sure that their content is compatible with

that context—by avoiding unknown presuppositions, by containing names and

concepts with a high 'news value', by avoiding names and concepts with low 'news

value', by connecting the story to previously known facts and prior expectations, and

by framing the story in the proper fashion. As we have seen, headlines do not meet

these criteria all at once. The art of headline production consists of formulating the

headline which meets the maximal number of the above conditions, thus providing

the reader with the optimal ratio between contextual eﬀect and processing eﬀort.

6. The strategy of tabloid headlines

From the point of view developed in this paper, tabloid headlines are not that diﬀer-

ent from the regular headlines which we ﬁnd in more 'respectable' newspapers. Tabloid

headlines simply take one relevance-optimization strategy, which we have already

looked at, to its logical extreme. As we have seen before, headlines may produce more

contextual eﬀects by directing the reader to the appropriate context of interpretation.

This is sometimes done at the expense of new information. In (25), for example, the fact

that the stolen taxi was later on found stuck in the mud was demoted from the headline,

and the expression 'another taxi robbery' was added, in order to instruct the reader to

retrieve information from long-term memory concerning previous taxi robberies- thus

constructing the optimal context for interpretation. Tabloid headlines can be

thought of as adopting this strategy all across the board: Keep your processing

eﬀort and your new information to the minimum, and optimize relevance by max-

imizing the context of interpretation. This is actually a theoretical re-interpretation

of Lindemann's formulations: Tabloid headlines are not very informative, but they

very eﬃciently trigger frames and belief systems in the reader's mind ; they evoke

images and scenarios in the reader. Let us look at some of Lindemann's examples:

(30) a. NO-LA-LA! The Frogs Get Bored with Bed

b. 'Dirt' at Posh Noshery

c. Boy's Whisky Hell

d. Space Ape Makes A Monkey Out of Moscow

The ﬁrst thing to note is that although these headlines are relatively unin-

formative, none of them is completely devoid of new information: (30a) reveals that

the French are becoming bored with sex; (30b) says that something dirty was dis-

covered in an exclusive restaurant; (30c) informs that some boy went through an

716 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

ordeal involving whisky; and (30d) asserts that a space ape drove Moscow crazy.

These new pieces of information may not have a very clear designation, and we may

be left with a lot of unresolved questions—which restaurant? What dirt? Which

ordeal? What is a space ape anyway?—but we nevertheless get a minimal amount of

new information out of each of these headlines.

The second and crucial point is that each of these headlines very eﬃciently

instructs the reader to construct an extremely rich context for interpretation- a

context full of cliches and prejudices, and feelings of fear, passion and hatred- in

which even the informationally-dull headlines carry more contextual eﬀects than a

lot of informationally-rich headlines in the more respectable newspapers. Consider

the headline in (30b). As its story reveals, a top restaurant in London faced allega-

tions of breaching hygiene regulations. In a regular newspaper, the same story

would probably be published under a headline like 'Top Restaurant Faces Hygiene

Allegations'. This headline is slightly more informative than (30b), but it does not

get anywhere close to the amount of contextual eﬀects produced by (30b). The

tabloid headline very eﬃciently raises in the readers' minds a complex set of notions-

vivid images of dirt and ﬁlth, feelings of envious contempt towards the rich people

who can aﬀord to eat in fancy restaurants, and so on and so forth- which then

constitute the context for the interpretation of the headline. In this context, the

slight information in the headline carries a great deal of contextual eﬀects: The story

is no longer that of the speciﬁc restaurant in London, but a generalized story

''revealing'' the ''real'' dirt behind the ''facade'' of expensive cuisine and the life-style

of the rich and famous. The same is true for the other headlines as well: (30a), as we

have already seen, raises a context consisting of a mixture of sexual frustration and

hatred and contempt towards the French. (30c) raises a context for interpretation

consisting of all the generalized fears involving children, alcohol and violence, and

thus carries a large set of contextual eﬀects: The headline translates a story about one

speciﬁc child into a story about children in general and their fragile existence—and

the context constructed by the readers' obviously includes their own children. (30d)

makes use of the mixture of fear and contempt towards the Soviet Union, and ridi-

cules it with a clever combination of reality and metaphor. The contextual eﬀects,

again, go well beyond the fact that the speciﬁc monkey sent to space by the Soviets

was interfering with the space mission; the tabloid headline is now about the

''incompetence'' of the fearful Soviet Union, a whole super-power ridiculed by a sin-

gle monkey.

7. Do headlines really attract readers to their stories?

As we have seen in section 2 , it has been claimed in the literature that newspaper

headlines have an additional function, which goes beyond the strict semantic-refer-

ential function, namely to ''attract the attention of the reader and provoke the

reader to read the whole story'' (Nir, 1993). In this section, I will discuss this func-

tion, and claim that it is better characterized as a relevance-based selection mechan-

ism, which rather than indiscriminately 'attract' all readers to all the stories in the

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 717

newspaper, serves to direct individual readers to the subset of stories which would

carry the optimal relevance for them.

The empirical starting point for this discussion is the rather obvious fact that

readers do not always read news items beyond the headline. On the contrary, most

readers spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines than reading the

stories. As Nir (1993) notes, ''for the modern newspaper reader, reading the headline

of a news item replaces the reading of the whole story'' (p. 24). If we stick to the

above deﬁnition of headlines as 'attracting devices', we are forced to conclude that

most headlines fail in fulﬁlling their function- a rather unintuitive conclusion to say

the least: If that was indeed the case, the headline would not survive the dynamic

evolution in the design of the modern newspaper. A much more reasonable

assumption is that the characteristic reading pattern manifested by scanning readers

is exactly what the headline is supposed to achieve. Let us see why this is the case:

The major claim made in this paper has been that headlines are relevance-optimi-

zers. This characterization of the headline means that an ordinary reader who has

ﬁnished reading a headline has already received the optimal amount of relevance for

its story. This means that reading beyond the headline, through the whole text,

would actually amount to a process of gradual reduction of the relevance of the story

for the reader. Think about the Kennedy story we have looked at before. The ﬁrst

sentence of the story—The bodies of John Kennedy Jr., his wife Caroline and his sis-

ter-in-law Lorraine were discovered yesterday in the ocean, at a depth of 30 meters, 10

kilometers away from Martha's Vineyard island, where they were headed on Satur-

day— adds considerably to the processing eﬀort, and adds some new information.

The crucial point, however, is that the additional amount of new information does

not necessarily add a suﬃcient amount of contextual eﬀects to make it worth the

ordinary reader's while to go through the interpretation process. The fact that the

bodies where found at a depth of 30 meters, for example, would probably have no

real contextual eﬀect for the ordinary reader. The second and third sentences-

Senator Edward Kennedy, John's uncle, arrived at the site where the bodies were

found, in order to identify them. Kennedy Jr. will be buried in NY in the coming days-

add to the processing eﬀort, but have a meager contextual eﬀect. All this means is

that the reader who decides to read the headline—John Kennedy Jr.'s body found—

and move on to the next headline, rather than delve into the story, makes a perfectly

rational decision, and actually gets the best (informational) value for (cognitive)

money possible. The selection of the best headline for a story is thus not supposed to

make the ordinary reader go on reading the story, but to insure that the reader has

indeed received the best 'deal' in reading the headline itself.

Does that mean that readers who nevertheless go on reading the whole story make

an irrational decision? Obviously not. According to our relevance-based conception,

we should expect two types of readers to go on reading the story beyond the head-

line- and still be rational in doing it. First, a fair number of readers may have a good

reason to expect to receive more contextual eﬀects from the story than the ordinary

reader. Among these, we should ﬁnd, for example, Kennedy aﬁcionados, celebrity

enthusiasts or aviation experts. Note that in regular speech, we would simply say

that these speciﬁc readers have a special interest in the story. In relevance-theory

718 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

jargon, we say that the cognitive context which they construct for the interpretation

of the story allows for the deduction of more contextual eﬀects for the same amount

of processing eﬀort. If an individual reader already knows a lot about Caroline

Kennedy, for example, it would make sense for him or her to go on reading through

the story, because her death would carry a signiﬁcant amount of contextual eﬀects for

that reader. In this sense, the headline serves as a selection-device for the readers,

directing each individual reader to those speciﬁc stories which may justify the invest-

ment of additional cognitive eﬀort in providing additional contextual dividends.

The second type of readers who would probably go on reading the story to the end

are those who would be willing to put in the extra eﬀort even if the contextual eﬀects

would not justify that. Among those, we should ﬁnd the avid readers- who enjoy

spending time reading a newspaper regardless of the speciﬁc contents of the stories. In

terms of relevance-theory, those readers have a diﬀerent cognitive style than the ordin-

ary reader- the threshold theyset for the ratio between contextual eﬀects and processing

eﬀort is lower than that of the ordinary reader. Note that cognitive styles form a con-

tinuum: Some people, for example, may ﬁnd the computation of the same con-

textual eﬀect more intellectually demanding than others; for those, the relevance of

any new assumption will be reduced in proportion to their processing eﬀort. Speci-

ﬁcally, other things being equal, proﬁcient readers will ﬁnd more news stories to be

relevant than less-proﬁcient ones. Moreover, some people may be generally more cur-

ious, interested or cognitively-energetic than others; they will be willing to spend more

energy for the computation of the same contextual eﬀect. Other things being equal,

these people will be willing to spend more energy on the same news story than the oth-

ers, regardless of the amount of contextual eﬀects carried by the story. This continuum

of cognitive styles plays a signiﬁcant role in editorial policies: For example, 'quality'

newspapers regularly assume that their readers are more proﬁcient, cognitively-ener-

getic and curious than 'popular' newspapers take their readers to be. This explains, for

example, the fact that headlines in 'quality' newspapers are, statistically speaking,

longer, more complex and more diﬃcult to read than headlines in 'popular' news-

papers. Note, moreover, that in those rare cases when we set the threshold for the ratio

between contextual eﬀects to processing eﬀort to zero - headlines lose their functional

role. This happens, for example, when we read every word in an old newspaper in order

to kill time waiting for a ﬂight. In this extreme context the headlines become redundant:

If we make a decision to read the whole newspaper, word by word, we no longer need

the headlines to direct us to those stories which are best suited for our interests.

8. Conclusion

Newspaper readers are ﬂooded on a daily basis with an amount of new informa-

tion which they have neither the time nor the energy to process. Newspaper head-

lines help them get the maximum out of this informational ﬂood—for the minimal

cognitive investment. First, headlines provide the readers with an optimally relevant

presentation of their stories. A good headline is one which helps the reader deduce

the maximal amount of contextual eﬀects for the minimal amount of processing

D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 719

eﬀort. Then, they guide individual readers to those speciﬁc stories which would be

worth their while to read in the full version. Thus, the reading patterns manifested

by newspaper readers are exactly what we should expect: Readers regularly scan the

headlines, and only occasionally stop to read the actual story. As relevance-optimi-

zers and relevance-based selection-devices, headlines function as negotiators between

stories and readers. As we have seen, producing the appropriate headline for a story

is a complex task exactly because the headline is neither a semantic summary of the

story nor a pragmatic attracting-device for the reader, but a communicative device

whose function is to produce the optimal level of aﬃnity between the content of the

story and the reader's context of interpretation, in order to render the story opti-

mally relevant for the reader. As the analysis of headline production in Ma'ariv

clearly shows, this delicate process involves the constant juggling of a large number

of diﬀerent, and sometimes contradictory, communicative imperatives.

As we have seen, our relevance-based conception of newspaper headlines has allowed

us to go beyond the descriptive distinctions between diﬀerent types of headlines, and

explain their functions as tactical variations on the theme of relevance optimization. It

thus provides for a novel way to conduct comparative analyses of headlines in diﬀerent

types of newspapers and in diﬀerent types of cultures of communication. As I have

already suggested, many of the major diﬀerences between newspapers may be

attributed to the assumptions made by the editors concerning the set of relevance

considerations shared by their readers—their cognitive styles, their reading proﬁciency,

their interests, their views, their fears and passions, and so on and so forth. Moreover, it

is an intriguing question, and as far as I can tell, a totally open one, whether diﬀerent

newspapers are actually successful in predicting the relevance-oriented proﬁles of their

readers. I would venture to hypothesize that those newspapers which are successful at

that are those which maintain a steady and well-deﬁned readership.

Finally, on a larger scale, the analysis presented in this paper should be thought of as

an exercise in the application of universalistic, psychologically-oriented theories to the

explanation of culturally-speciﬁc, variable social phenomena. Modern newspaper

headlines are a very late cultural development, yet their functional nature is best char-

acterized using a set of constitutive, cognitive notions which are applicable in principle to

a very wide set of acts of intentional communication. As opposed to some of the current

thinking in the social sciences, the imposition of a universalistic theory on a speciﬁc

cultural phenomenon does not automatically entail indiﬀerence to the ﬁne-grained

patterns of social variability involved. In our case, for example, the universalistic fra-

mework actually helps us capture the diﬀerences and similarities between headlines in

regular and tabloid newspapers in an explanatory, rather than a merely descriptive,

fashion. I take this to be a very encouraging sign that the importation of theoretical

insights from the cognitive domain into the social sciences is a worthwhile endeavor.

Acknowledgements

I thank two anonymous referees for their helpful and insightful comments on this

paper.

720 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721

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... information should be sufficient to be informative, but only as much as required [47]. Meanwhile, the maxim of relation may favor brevity, introducing a tension between being informative and being concise [48,49]. There are reasons why shorter headlines may be expected to perform better. ...

Kristina Gligoric
George Lifchits
Robert West
Ashton Anderson

What makes written text appealing? In this registered report protocol, we propose to study the linguistic characteristics of news headline success using a large-scale dataset of field experiments (A/B tests) conducted on the popular website Upworthy comparing multiple headline variants for the same news articles. This unique setup allows us to control for factors that can have crucial confounding effects on headline success. Based on prior literature and a pilot partition of the data, we formulate hypotheses about the linguistic features that are associated with statistically superior headlines. We will test our hypotheses on a much larger partition of the data that will become available after the publication of this registered report protocol. Our results will contribute to resolving competing hypotheses about the linguistic features that affect the success of text and will provide avenues for research into the psychological mechanisms that are activated by those features.

... In addition, it can be construed that the local newspapers believed that their readers were more likely up-to-date on the transgender athlete debate in each state and, as a result, did not need to inundate them with information that was already widely known, whether in the headline or body of an article. This coincides with Dor's (2003) research, which found that newspaper headlines "optimize the relevance" of stories by providing enough information for readers to comprehend context (p. 696). ...

Debates of who is and is not permitted to participate in sport have been magnified in regard to those whose gender identity deviates from traditional heteronormative standards. Former high school transgender athletes Mack Beggs and Andraya Yearwood, in states with different stances toward trans participation, were thrust into media spotlights. A content analysis examined local and national newspaper reporting about the individuals and their states' policies. Newspapers did not uphold perceived hegemonic ideals associated with sport by negatively depicting each marginalized athlete. Journalists applauded both for driving conversations toward equal opportunity in high school athletics.

... Moreover, Lombardi (2018) has argued that persuasion is a technique that politicians use to put influence on the minds of readers/listeners. Dor (2003) has claimed that politicians, through the political language, impose their ideology on the minds of people by using the rhetoric devices of persuasion. Lodhi et al. (2019) have stated that politicians impose their ideologies through the strong language skills, select the words according to the desires of the people and present their ideology within the wishes of the people (listeners/readers). ...

Robin Blom

Expectancy violations play important roles as heuristics in communication processes, yet prior research has focused more on incongruence between (news) sources and messages rather than assessing expectation levels as a mechanism for variations in message believability. An online experiment indicated that news headline believability for both a prominent daily newspaper and a religion news wire service was largely determined by an interaction between source trust and the extent to which news consumers were surprised of the headline's origin.

Nick Hagar
Nicholas Diakopoulos
Burton DeWilde

Headlines play an important role in both news audiences' attention decisions online and in news organizations' efforts to attract that attention. A large body of research focuses on developing generally applicable heuristics for more effective headline writing. In this work, we measure the importance of a number of theoretically motivated textual features to headline performance. Using a corpus of hundreds of thousands of headline A/B tests run by hundreds of news publishers, we develop and evaluate a machine-learned model to predict headline testing outcomes. We find that the model exhibits modest performance above baseline and further estimate an empirical upper bound for such content-based prediction in this domain, indicating an important role for non-content-based factors in test outcomes. Together, these results suggest that any particular headline writing approach has only a marginal impact, and that understanding reader behavior and headline context are key to predicting news attention decisions.

This article aims to explain the perceived quality of online news articles. Discovering which elements of a news story influence readers' perceptions could drive online popularity, which is the paramount factor of digital news readership. This work explores an approach to use tree-based machine learning algorithms to address this problem based on selected characteristics, which measure engagement, drawn from prior research mostly developed by communication scientists. A proposed extended model is used to examine the association between the engagement features and perceived quality concerning all the articles depending mainly on their genre. To demonstrate the capacity of using predictive analytics to facilitate journalistic news writing the proposed methodology is applied on a novel data set with 200K articles in total constructed from a blog site. The results of phase A, indicate interesting correlations between the features and the perceived quality of the articles. In stage B, the paper seeks to extract a set of rules that can be used as guidelines for authors in the writing of their next articles, indicating the probability of popularity that their articles may gain if these rules are taken into consideration.

Virginia Small

There are three key sections of this chapter. The first is the ideal of a public broadcaster as a force for influential good and the role it generally is expected to fulfil, not just in the media but more importantly in the life of a nation. At a time in history when other governments were observed to use propaganda to craft national thinking, radio was seen as a potent means of controlling the national mindset. This chapter also develops an understanding of the power of ABC staff culture and how it has constrained ABC leadership and management with a dismissiveness of management decision-making. Third, this chapter describes the ABC's slide into same field as Rupert Murdoch of commercial opinion and commentary and how the ABC failed to treasure its Bourdieusian cultural capital and develop frameworks, strategies, succession-planning, bulwarks and policies that would protect its values and reputation in this now primary, highly contested, yet seductive digital media field. The evolving, expanding commercial media field, like the universe itself, consists of a more random assortment of actors and factors than the Aunty could ever have dreamt. This chapter conducts a thematic content analysis of a prominent news story reported by the ABC where there were accusations of bias in the coverage. Ultimately, this research found it was the infiltration of opinion articles, creative writing and images on news pages, which also contained neutral court reports, that upset and compromised ABC impartiality as it competes in, and with, the commercial digital field.

Johan Galtung
Mari Holmboe Ruge

Using a simplified psychology of perception and some additional assumptions, a system of twelve factors describing events is presented that together are used as a definition of 'newsworthiness'. Three basic hypotheses are presented: the additivity hypothesis that the more factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it becomes news; the complementarity hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other since if one factor is present it is less necessary for the other factors to be present for the event to become news; and the exclusion hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will not become news. This theory is then tested on the news presented in four different Norwegian newspapers from the Congo and Cuba crises of July 1960 and the Cyprus crisis of March-April 1964, and the data are in the majority of cases found to be consistent with the theory. A dozen additional hypotheses are then deduced from the theory and their social implications are discussed. Finally, some tentative policy impli cations are formulated.

Nancy M. Henley
Michelle D. Miller
Jo Anne Beazley

This research tested hypotheses that news media often report violence against women (VAW) in passive-verb format and that this leads readers to be more accepting of VAW than reports using the active voice. In Study 1, 1,501 verbs from news stories were classified as having active or passive voice. Passive voice use for both VAW (rape) and nonsexual violence (murder) was greater than for comparison verbs. Findings of a follow-up semantic differential study suggested that these verbs'negativity could account for the results. In a third study, 54 college students read mock news reports on rape, battery, robbery, and murder, rated victim harm and perpetrator responsibility after each, and completed scales of attitudes toward sexual violence. With passive voice, males, but notfemales, attributed less victim harm and perpetrator responsibility for VAW than with active voice. Both females and males showed more acceptance of VAW with passive voice use.