In every headline, a reader simply wants to know what happened
A man reads a newspaper in Chiga, Kisumu East. PHOTO | JACOB OWITI | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- Active verb is the event.
- Such a verb must come as early as possible in every news headline.
What happened is a vital question in journalism. For the answer to it is what every newspaper is in the marketplace to sell. And the subeditors—all the unsung heroes and heroines of newspaper production worldwide—know or should know that, in every news headline, the active verb is what represents what happened.
In short, the active verb is the event. The active verb is, in other words, the news. This is why such a verb must come as early as possible in every news headline. That was what seemed wrong with the following headline on page 12 of the Daily Nation of August 9: “Man suspected of killing father in feud arrested”.
If arrested is the news, please notice that the verb has been relegated to the very end of that headline. In that heading, the subeditor has given preference to a myriad of other words which do not at all constitute the news. It is that the subeditor has placed the verb arrested too far away from the subject, namely man, which is its base of operations.
The verb arrested is too far removed from the noun man, which is its very subject, its very activator.
In that sentence, we have three verbs: suspected, killing and has been arrested. The question is: Which one of those verbs represents the real news? It depends on which one expresses the latest and most newsworthy event.
THE LATEST
Here, the fact that somebody “has been arrested” is the latest in that whole concatenation of events. To reiterate, “has been arrested” is what is really new. It is the news.
Yet, watch out! For, although an arrest is usually a very active event, the word arrested is not the active verb in such a construction.
Here, arrested is no longer even a genuine verb. In that construction, arrested is actually adjectival and can be made meaningful only if preceded by a helping verb of the kind that grammarians call auxiliary. In the phrase is arrested, the word is auxiliary because it just helps the true verb to express a tense.
Yet here I must congratulate the subeditor. For she or he has done well to elide the conjugated part is from the headline in order to catalyse the pace of his or her information. Whenever a subeditor uses too many unnecessary words in her or his headline, she or he checks its speed and thus frustrates its meaning.
In the newspaper business, a headline’s speed is as important as its content, its intended “message”. Thus, in the Nation’s case, the conjugated verb is has been elided. In both speech and writing, to elide is to leave a word or set of words out of a sentence without affecting the meaning that the writer originally had in mind.
Moreover, the very essence of the verb (arrested) has been relegated to the very end of the headline, thus delaying and even frustrating its significance to the whole message.
