Wednesday, January 05, 2005
For tabloid headlines, it's still the N.Y. Post.
It's been a good 21 years since "Headless Body in Topless Bar", and still nobody in the NY press can match them. Competitors even write in open admiration...
... Now, if you're a newspaper copyeditor, how do you craft a headline that will capture both the tawdry, zany flavor of this story and a would-be reader's attention? After all, as one of the investigating officers put it, "so many jokes, so little time."
Newsday completely dropped the ball ... 1010 WINS was even worse ...
The Daily News gave it the old college try, but the results weren't much better. Their struggle to out-Post the Post in recent years has usually left them with headlines that oscillate between the merely descriptive and the utterly incoherent. This time they fell in between those two...
No, this week's headline-to-headline winner is again the Post. They understood what that officer was saying, saw what they had in the story, and took it as far as they dared with:
"Hookers Relish Wieners".
