That saying was about the two types of knowledge:

There is knowledge that you know, and there is knowledge that you know where to look to find.

Thinking about that now I can imagine a third:

What you think you know, but don’t.

And a fourth:

What you think you know where to find on the web, but which has since disappeared from that location and is no longer in google’s cache.

We don’t know where our online headlines will end up. Our article headlines are what the search engines use to figure out what we’re talking about. In print, you have all sorts of context. Online your context is not guaranteed. The headline is the most-often piece of linked text, which means it’s got to be able to stand by itself in the middle of nowhere dot com and still make sense.

With that in mind, here are some tips on making headlines work better on the web. The examples included are from the morning’s headlines on denverpost.com, and all of them have since been fixed (thanks, Demetria):

Use place names and people names as often as possible.

Labels like “city” and “state” should never be a headline’s only word used to describe location. Be specific. Column widths don’t control your pen like they did in the past.

• Example: “Growers cheer as rains put state totals near norm” works much better when it’s “Growers cheer as rains put Colorado totals near norm”
• Ex: “Police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” makes no sense on its own, “Montrose police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” helps a little more.
• Ex: “More farmers losing hope” could apply to farmers anywhere in the world. “More Colorado farmers losing hope” fixes that.
• Ex: “Justice not on city’s to-do list” could apply to any city. “Justice not on Denver’s to-do list” makes it clear which on we’re talking about.
• Ex: “Lottery a loser in current economy.” — “Colorado lottery a loser in current economy”
• Ex: “Star’s status does affect at-risk kids” — “Brandon Marshall’s star status does affect at-risk kids”

Abbreviations make sense to us, and the people who are familiar with us. They may not make sense to search engines, or the non-Denver Post lingo savvy.

• Example: ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Springs’ — ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Colorado Springs’ is much more explicit about the location, and that this happened in Colorado.
• Ex: ‘No doubt Nugs are for real’ is not hard to turn into ‘No doubt Nuggets are for real’

Puns are nonsense, and explicit trumps cutesy 95% of the time.

Here are some cutesy heds — try imagining if you saw those links on a list of headlines, and whether you have enough information about what’s on the other side of that click to consider making that click.

• Example: “High dudgeon — and other bits”
• Ex: “Hard slog on dimes and nickels”
• Ex: “Heart was dialed in on caring”
• Ex: “Forget that game, but not this team”

Watch out for label headlines.

If you have a label headline, often there’s a subhead, and often that subhead is what should be the headline online.

• Example: “Facebook time travel” — this one had a great subhead, “Old friends are new again using social networking — from the comfort of their own laptop”. There are a couple ways to approach this rewrite, and “Facebook time travel: Old friends are new again using social networking” gets the point across best.
• Ex: “Hoop Dreams” could have easily been “Hula Hoop Dreams: A rigorous workout with meditative benefits puts a new spin on an old toy”

If you’ve got any more resources about writing headlines for online, or suggestions, add ‘em in the comments below.

Reading this followed my discovery of the Kankakee Daily Journal’s site, which allows comments on the two or three grafs of articles they provide online — the rest of the word-based news is tucked behind the pay e-edition wall.

I’m asking myself: Is PDF-style delivery really the future of newspapers? The e-edition PDFs are attractive to newspapers — they look like the print edition, and they contribute to print-circ numbers. But they also ignore the possibilities of online advertising, which is a glaring problem with many newspaper-dot-coms.

Have newspaper execs who make those decisions learned anything in the last decade? Geez, they’ve hired expert tradesmen to run the printing presses for years. Along comes the Internet and they won’t hire enough tech experts to maintain and innovate as a Gutenberg moment in history slams into them and which requires major adaptation.’

–Steve Outing, posted on the Online News listserv

I’ve got one angle, it’s not very good but it’s what I had in my head tonight: Find out who’s downloading and saving the articles you publish on your site. Groups and organizations do this — often they’re government orgs, putting together information for their employees. Your news org doesn’t get anything when they’re saving your stuff to their servers, but, if your news org provided a service that put this news together for them on your site, and charged for that service, those organizations wouldn’t have to spend the time looking for that data, and your news org wouldn’t lose the page views to the people pulling your content for their own uses.

Here’s a better riff on the “news concierge” angle (because, honestly, who knows the information you publish better than you do?): Law firms often have to look up specific information. Many times they call newsrooms looking for that information online. What are newsrooms doing answering those phone calls for free? No, what we need is an information retainer fee. No questions asked or answered until the law firm (or, heck, pr firm) pays up. This is a service a newsroom library could provide.

1. Build an audience around a link-based social news site for local information.
2. Once your site has some power users, give them blogs.
3. Team up with hacker/developers for special projects.
4. Once your site has built some momentum, hire a part-time ad sales person .
5. Once your site’s earning $300-$400 a week in profit, start contracting with freelance journalists. Scoop local, stuck-in-the-print paper.
6. Add more writers to your blogs.
7. Build enough audience so a front-page link on your site will deliver at least 1,500 clicks to its destination, your blogs are breaking news that isn’t anywhere else, and you have the ability to set the agenda in the community you cover.

When you hide your information behind a pay-wall or registration-wall, you’re penalizing people’s money or time for access to your stuff.

Charging for your content penalizes all involved in the linking / recommending of that content.

Hey Kevin,

Here are two articles most worth reading:

• A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change
• Holovaty’s article from a year ago in XML mag is pretty decent too

And here are links to the blogs in my “must-read” category on my feed reader:

• Matt McAlister
• The most-popular links on delicious tagged “journalism”
• Ryan Sholin
• Mark Potts
• CAR reporter for the Houston Chron
• Steve Yelvington
• Will Sullivan (the Journerdism guy, you’ve prob already heard of him)
• Bokardo: these guys had a good run of posts last year, though they’ve slacked off in quality recently

Clay Shirky’s links on del.icio.us are sometimes interesting too

And if you’re interested in the online news-types I follow on twitter, this is my online news-oriented / professional-joe twitter account

I’ve kept a library of online news-related links for four years — this is the category of links I call “Good Reads” for online journalism there.

I know there are 151 links in there, so here are the highlights (in cases where the title of the post wasn’t obvious in the URL, I pasted it after):

1. www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000501.php ( “How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control” )
2. www.mattmcalister.com/blog/2006/05/26/59/media-needs-to-reflect-attention-not-collect-attention/
3. publishing2.com/2008/08/07/how-newsrooms-throw-away-value-by-not-linking-to-sources-on-the-web/
4. bokardo.com/archives/activity-centered-design/
5. www.howardowens.com/2008/not-all-information-needs-to-be-crafted-into-a-story/
6. www.useit.com/alertbox/bounce-rates.html
7. www.slate.com/id/2193552/ ( “How we read” )
8. www.doshdosh.com/how-to-build-a-better-content-model-for-your-site/
9. www.wmhartnett.com/2008/05/19/lets-not-forget-what-was-killing-us-before-the-internet/
10. www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2008/nt-2008-03-31-tv-advertising.htm ( “Finding is the new advertising: Traditional advertising is broken because it charges us time, when time is becoming our most valuable resource. ” )
11. newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/03/think-big-act-small.html
12. The big lie about free
13. www.pbs.org/idealab/2008/02/databases-as-entry-points-to-investigative-stories005.html
14. Why Building The Geographic Web Is Hard, and Why It’s Worth Doing
15. When local newspapers aren’t local
16. www.howardowens.com/2008/looking-ahead-local-will-be-the-big-media-winner/
17. www.thepomoblog.com/archive/the-incomparable-umair-haque/
18. ryansholin.com/2007/04/24/a-few-long-tail-basics-for-newspapers/
19. The programmer as journalist: a Q&A with Adrian Holovaty
20. www.readwriteweb.com/archives/attention_economy_overview.php
21. www.howardowens.com/2006/great-essay-about-online-communities/
22. www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt-2005-08-15-simplicity.htm ( “Simplicity is hard work” )
23. sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/11/understanding_l.html ( “Understanding Local Max” )

I just remembered one more — this guy is the smartest read I’ve seen when it comes to the online economy and publishing: Umair Haque.  Umair mostly publishes on his Harvard blog here, but he used to write on BubbleGeneration, here.

You can have these links (well, links in the same vein) delivered: Get these links delivered via twitter here, or subscribe to this online journalism link feed (low-frequency, 3-5 posts a week) via rss / web feeds here.

Also, if you have an article or two you’d like on the list, post it in the comments below.

Read the whole article about website response time here.

(via the interaction designer’s coffee break)