When headline with a question mark at the end confuses readers

"Prayer in futility?" That was the controversial headline in last Friday’s Daily Nation.

Emblazoned across the front page, it was the first thing one read in the story covering the National Prayer Breakfast at Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi.

Some people read the headline as a declarative statement — as if there was no question mark.

“I don’t agree with the headline that the prayer breakfast was a prayer in futility,” says Erick Wekesa, a prayer leader at Gospel Centres International who attended the event.

“First, the sermon by keynote speaker Lord Michael Hastings was relevant to our current situation. Secondly, the prayers were assigned to people who meant business.

INTERCESSION

"In any case, it’s our flaws as a nation that continually draw us in the courts of God for divine succour. Those few hell-bent on politicking are part of prayer items, not the praying crew.

“Let us not trivialise the need to seek divine intervention in our national agenda. Let our leaders pray, pray and pray. They will be transformed in the process.

"If we declare the prayers were futile, it’s like we’ve predetermined the outcome of the supplications and intercession made during the prayer breakfast."

Question headlines can be written because the editor is not sure he has an answer to the question.

CURIOSITY

If he knows the answer, he would not need to write the headline as a question.

If, for example, the answer to the controversial headline was “yes”, he would have used a declarative statement: “Futile prayer”.

But editors also place a question mark at the end of a headline to generate interest and arouse the curiosity of the reader. Example: “Does drinking hot uji cause cancer?”

Front-page question headlines in the Nation are not common. Recent ones include “Will Raila bring SGR home?”, and “Economy grew, but where are the jobs?” (both on April 26 in different editions of the paper); “Who stole Sh10bn from Treasury?’ (May 18) and Taifa Leo’s “Ufisadi: Nani Msema Kweli?” (March 2).

A good question headline should match the tone of the article and not create an unintended meaning or confuse the reader.

MAXIMS

It should be used only when the content of the story justifies it and provides factual information that might give the answer to the question, and not emotion or uncertainty.

Question headline stories that provide no answer to the question are mostly likely incomplete, thin and unprofessional.

A British editor, Andrew Marr, formulated a maxim in his 2004 book My Trade.

Advising readers how they should interpret newspaper articles, he said: “If the headline asks a question, try answering ‘no’… A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or oversold. It’s often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic.”

And in 2009, a British technology journalist, Ian Betteridge, came up with “Betteridge’s Law of Headlines” to remind journalists of the pitfalls of question headlines.

ACCEPTABILITY

The law is based on the idea that newspapers place a question mark on a headline about a story for which the editor does not have the facts to support the main message.

In an article in the online magazine TechCrunch, he said: “This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.

"The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.”

Regardless of the Betteridge’s Law, a question headline is acceptable if the question is answered in the story.

It’s not acceptable if it’s used to avoid taking a clear position, merely to arouse readers’ interest or to hide behind lazy journalism.

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