"Don't let reality spoil a good headline."

One of the few surviving vestiges of the archaeology of journalism is the "inverted pyramid" rule: writing news in order of decreasing importance: the most important at the top, to capture the reader's attention, and, in the current code of algorithms, to distribute, more by engineering. keywords To make them seem even more so. The secret of this pyramid is, of course, its apex, where the smallest amount of verbal information must contain the maximum quality of information to encourage reading and unravel the secret of the news.

Although the first verses of the Iliad –an excellent translation into Catalan hexameters by Pau Sabaté!– are a headline, "The Fatal Wrath of Achilles." Journalistically, this technique dates back to the American Civil War, where telegraph transmission meant that, to avoid potential technical interference or cable sabotage, a great example of journalistic illustration, he turned it around and made a self-critical joke about our reviled profession, where two war reporters decide to go and telegraph when they agree they haven't seen anything. The linotypist had it ergonomically easy and started from the bottom, where the trash was supposed to settle.

Defining the article in a condensed form is important, so much so that when the journalist arrives at the newsroom, it is traditional for the chain of command to ask him "what's the headline?" This hierarchy can intervene in its configuration and, if it makes the front page, even rewrite it. ad hoc, for example, reducing it to words and loading it with substance and ink; those classic sports titles before a final that were a source of joke in the years of lead and lead: "It was achieved" either "It couldn't be"Jaume Serrats Ollé was bold in his heartbreaking headline, and since he was not only an excellent journalist but also a lawyer, he knew how far he could go without resorting to court or sensationalism. "You can exaggerate without lying," says another trade union aphorism, and here's an example as powerful as the headline of our article. editorial from the 29th: "Cocaine-addicted Barcelona", which justifies itself in the first line, where the article disappears: "It's hard to say it like this: cocaine-addicted Barcelona. It may sound exaggerated. But no..." The very literary journalistic addition to the synecdoche.

Developing this idea, perhaps starting from Mark Twain, William Randolph Hearst and a couple of films that really make us cringe – one of them, The Sublime First page, by Billy Wilder–, the Hippocratic violation of journalism is burned into the memory: "Don't let reality spoil a good headline."

The ARA Readers' Advocate has two emails that place a headline on this threshold of "the doors of perception," with Aldous Huxley's permission. Subscribers Tirs Abril and Jordi Regincós point to the headline "Three jihadists arrested in the metropolitan area hours before the great blackout" (02/05/2025), which, at least subliminally, may connote the most historic darkness after that of the death of Christ and that of New York on the 1st.

Reader Regincós says: "I understand that headlines should grab attention with few words and that's how it's always been since the press has existed... but in the written press that was done so that people would try to read the news or article (it had practically no impact on advertising, except, perhaps, for the headlines on the front page that could be translated online; the headlines on the main pages don't seek so much to get people to read the news as to get people to change pages and be shown new ads. This is where the danger exists either of misinforming or of creating false expectations that, in the long run, are bad."

For his part, reader Abril points out: "I can think of headlines that wouldn't cause so much alarm, such as 'Three jihadists arrested in the metropolitan area the day before the Barça vs. Inter match', or perhaps 'Three jihadists arrested in the metropolitan area hours before the demonstration against Mazón in Valencia was cancelled'. Three jihadists in the metropolitan area of Barcelona'. This one omits the time reference, but the context given by the immediacy of the press I think is enough to know that the events happened not long ago."

The author of the article, Cesc Maideu, thanks subscribers for their comments and gives us his version:

"This anti-jihadist operation by the Mossos d'Esquadra took place just hours before the big blackout. The moment everything went dark, practically all of Catalonia's police officers left their jobs and focused on maintaining public order and rescuing affected people, and arrests wouldn't have been possible. Those were days when we only talked about the blackout, and we found it a good way to connect the two events, without seeking any kind of alarmism or sensationalism.

I add that both readers deflate archaeology in the rigorous digital present: "click-fishing headlines." According to a study by the Digital New Report (June 17), analyzed by Marta Santisteban in the Report.cat of the Catalan Association of Journalists, there are now more readers—especially young people—who get their information from social media than from traditional media, "which in recent years have had to adapt—with greater or lesser success—to new languages." In this dynamic, acting as "click-fishing" becomes one of the countermeasures that the press must activate to keep quality journalism, the truthfulness and reliability that are our assets afloat in the face of the quantitative onslaught of languages. short, uncontrolled and in the hands ofinfluencers who may be perfectly undocumented.

I'll continue talking about headlines. I've been developing this topic with subscribers Tirs Abril and Jordi Regincós, who have very kindly provided me with new controversial headlines, and I invite readers to interact on such an important topic by sending me their comments. Without wishing to enter into the pernicious "and you too" that politics has taken hold in, let's just say that sectors of the sports and entertainment press have no problem with headlines that are just too loud; look at this, published in a publication that I'm not lying about because I'm not the defender of its readers: "Leo XIV's 12-year relationship comes to light: we lived together and we trust each other"...You had to go into the article to find out the secret of the pyramid: it referred to an Augustinian brother.

The Readers' Ombudsman pays attention to doubts, suggestions, criticisms and complaints about the contents of the newspaper in its digital and paper editions, and ensures that the treatment of information is in accordance with the codes of ethics.

By contact the Readers' Ombudsman You can send an email to eldefensor@ara.cat or record a message of no more than one minute on WhatsApp at 653784787. In all cases, identification with your name, surname, and ID number is required.