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-knowledge, their beliefs and
expectations and their cognitive styles—no less than it requires an
understanding of the story. It reduces the differences between the different
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 Wilson’s
theory, and then develop the notion of relevance optimization. In Section 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 production from close range. I will show 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 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 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.