For this unit Refers to Student’s Book pages Writing headlines

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UNIT 1 Newspapers Teacher’s Notes
Cambridge English for the Media   Cambridge University Press 2009     
www.cambridge.org/elt/englishforthemedia

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Background information and useful web links
Writing headlines
Headlines 
and secondary headlines (also called 
subheads
) tend to be written by sub-
editors rather than the journalist who wrote the article. 
Front page headlines
 are 
especially important, as they have to attract potential buyers to the newspaper, while 
inside headlines have to make readers want to read the articles, usually once they 
have bought the paper. 
The language of headlines in English (which is sometimes called 
headlines
 /
hedlaIni:z
/) 
is notorious for containing strange vocabulary (
tabloidese
 /
t{blOIdi:z
/), unusual 
grammar, and large amounts of wordplay and cultural references, all of which make 
them extremely challenging for non-native speakers to understand. If students are 
going to write headlines for other non-native speakers, they would be better off 
limiting the amount of tricky language and focus instead on the techniques for making 
headlines more powerful, also explored within this section.
In the UK, newspapers have traditionally been divided into two types: