Tiger Woods, Lindsay Lohan, iPad

Monday, 17 May 2010 | by Pat's Picks

Sorry to mislead you but Tiger, Lindsay and anything Apple-related have proven to be our best attention-grabbing tricks, an important skill to possess in a world where headline writing has been turned on its, well, head. News organizations are becoming hip to the fact that they are served better by search engine optimization if they include words that have proven their mettle when it comes to clickability. 

David Carr of the New York Times writes a great piece on the subject in today’s paper, quoting the new editor of Newsweek.com who says that in a news industry dominated by RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter, headlines have become ?naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.?  At Pat’s Papers, we try not to become to beholden to the Internet search gods. But after a couple well-formed headlines significantly bumped us up in Google results, we found it hard to resist. The upshot is that our most promising stories are often sent to the RSS feed cloaked in the headline equivalent of a burka.

The more concise we try to get, the longer our headlines become. There are some exceptions: “Adobe Attacks Apple with Love” was a big story for us last week. But so was “America’s Tallest Man Dines with World’s Tallest Man.” And our biggest story of the year is posted under the unwieldy question, “What If Everybody in Canada Flushed At Once?” So I guess that means I’ll be ending the same way I began, with an apology: Until the day when Tiger Woods actually does meet Lindsay Lohan at the Apple store to shop for iPads,  we’ve put brevity on the back burner.