‘Coming up next’: The discourse of television news headlines

Abstract

Despite the adoption of the term headline for both print news and broadcast news, their roles in the different media are not the same. Print headlines are mostly contiguous with the story to which they refer. Broadcast headlines, however, are often at some temporal distance from their associated news item. In the print medium every story carries a headline. In broadcast news only some items are headlined. And yet, whereas the linguistic properties of print headlines have been much studied, almost no attention has been given to broadcast headlines. This article uses a corpus of headlines from BBC television news to explore their discursive form and function. It isolates a basic structure of {heading (+supplement)} for television news headlines and delineates a repertoire of patterns through which the structure is realised. In doing so, it suggests that the core function of television news headlines is to engage with the audience by projecting aspects of their news values forward through the programme.

Keywords

Direct address heading sequential organisation summary supplement systemic functional grammar television news headline trailer transitivity

Introduction

The language of newspaper headlines has been studied in some detail from a variety of perspectives. There are studies of their linguistic form, of their communicative function (Bell, 1991; Dor, 2003; Van Dijk, 1988), of their stylistic peculiarities, as well as of the linguistic processing problems that they engender (Perfetti et al., 1987). Much of the research literature rests on the assumption that headlines function as a summary of the news story below them, acting rather like an ‘abstract’, to use Labov’s term from his analysis of natural narratives (Labov and Waletzky, 1967), but they may also be used as a strategy for attracting the reader’s interest. Indeed, this latter possibility may well override the former in those headlines where, for instance, an enigma is posed or where wordplay such as punning or alliteration is foregrounded. In such cases, the ensuing story may provide the solution of the headline’s enigma and be of interest to the reader primarily on those grounds. In any case, it has been observed that experienced readers rarely read the whole newspaper (Dor, 2003). Instead, they scan the headlines in order to decide which stories to read and may even find the headline itself sufficiently informative for them to ignore the remaining text.

For all of these studies the focus of attention has been exclusively on print (or newspaper) headlines. Indeed, the very name ‘headline’, of course, implies particularly the medium of print since the term can literally be understood as the ‘line’ that comes at the ‘head’ or top of the news story. The name carries, therefore, a sense of position within a spatial and typographic layout. Headlines are, indeed, a comparatively late development in the history of journalism, emerging towards the end of the 19th century at a time of increased competition among newspapers for readership. And certainly, front page layout, font size and typeface tend to make the most of headlines, presumably so as to maximise their visibility in an effort to positively influence the potential ‘spot’ buyer of a newspaper. In more general terms, of course, the wide availability of news in many forms across several platforms (online, print and broadcast) with a growing tendency to ‘push’ material requires increasing selectivity on the part of the news consumer. And headlines can clearly provide readers with a way of determining the relevance of an item to their own interests (Dor, 2003), enabling a degree of selectivity in their choice of items to read.

Overall, however, little or no attention has been given in the research literature to journalistic headlines in media other than print. And yet the term, despite its spatial and typographic connotations, does have a much wider currency than print. It is, for instance, used routinely in broadcast bulletin news programmes at the beginning and within the programme to provide a shorthand list of upcoming news items. There is no question here, however, of the headline drawing attention to one news item rather than another within a kaleidoscopic arrangement of items, or of providing a summary of the story to which they are attached, or even of singling out an item for the viewer’s special and undivided attention. Broadcast news is experienced as a flow (Williams, 1990 [1974]), where selectivity consists principally of the capacity to switch off or switch channels. And since broadcast news headlines may be separated by several minutes from the item to which they refer, they may be better understood as ‘trailers’, projecting forward into the programme, providing clues to its overall structure and providing the audience with reasons to keep viewing or listening. As such they help to punctuate and structure the experience of flow within the broadcast news cycle.

The purpose of this article, therefore, is to explore – by means of close analysis of the linguistic form of television news headlines, as well as their corresponding discourse structure and practices – how the different communicative function and role of headlines is realised in the broadcast medium as opposed to print (or other typographic medium). For, like any communication, the discourse of television news headlines requires a structured arrangement of items in sequence in the service of particular kinds of acts. In the case of such a well-defined institutionalised discourse as television news, a highly particularised subgenre like headlines becomes instantly recognisable. Accordingly, we set out to identify the key forms, acts and discourse practices that make up television news headlines. As a subgenre of news, a television news headline has its particular arrangement of discourse acts, forms and practices, including, for instance, summarising, attributing, specifying, highlighting and condensing, in addition to less determinate features of their composition such as setting a tone.

In doing so, we draw on two major traditions of work. First, interactional sociolinguistics, understood most broadly as dedicated to the description of – in Goffman’s (1983) term – the interaction order, but also owing a debt more specifically to studies of ‘talk-in-interaction’, especially of an institutional kind growing originally out of Sacks, Jefferson and others (e.g. Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff and Sacks, 1984 [1973]; Schegloff et al., 1977) but leading to studies of talk in specific institutional settings such as court rooms (Atkinson and Drew, 1979), clinical settings (Heritage and Maynard, 2006; Maynard and Heritage, 2005), news interviews (Clayman and Heritage, 2002; Greatbatch, 1986; Heritage and Clayman, 2010; Hutchby, 2006; Montgomery, 2008), and so on. Second, we draw on the tradition of Firthian linguistics as developed on the one hand in studies of discourse by Sinclair, Coulthard, Brazil, Montgomery and others (see e.g. Coulthard and Montgomery, 1981; Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975) and on the other hand in Systemic Functional Linguistics growing out of Halliday’s work in Functional Grammar, including the study of transitivity (Halliday, 1976, 1994 [1985]; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) and nominalisation (Halliday, 1994 [1985]; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). According to Halliday, language works as a system of ‘meaning potential’ or sets of resources organized as options for what speakers can do in the process of communication (Halliday, 1978: 39). The system of meaning potential is organised through three metafunctions, namely ideational (representing facts, experience and logic), interpersonal (facilitating social and interpersonal relationships) and textual (connecting meanings and ideas into a meaningful text) (Halliday, 1978: 112), among which the ideational function is realised by a system of transitivity, among others. Transitivity is a way of realising the ideational function, thereby representing experience or, indeed, ‘anything that can be expressed by a verb’ (Halliday, 1976: 159). He specifies six types of PROCESS, comprising material, mental, verbal, behavioural, relational and existential processes. A process, in principle, consists of ‘the process itself’, ‘participants’ and ‘circumstances’ (Halliday, 1994 [1985]: 107). A material process, for example, can be that of agent + process + goal + circumstance, as shown below.

the centre back	kicked	the ball	over the line
Agent	Process	Goal	Circumstance

When discussing grammatical metaphors, Halliday suggests that a verb phrase can change into a noun phrase so that a dynamic action or process can be transformed into a static, abstract state, which he calls nominalisation (Halliday, 1994 [1985]; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). We will apply this notion to the analysis of headlines functioning as trailers for subsequent news items.

Data

The study is based upon a corpus of news bulletins from BBC News at Ten (also known as BBC Ten O’clock News), the flagship news bulletin programme on BBC One. In total, 10 of its editions were collected, including those from 9 to 13 January 2012 (henceforth the first period) and from 7 to 11 January 2013 (henceforth the second period). On average, each edition covers around 10 news items, lasting around 25 minutes in length, and each edition contains around six news headlines. In our data, each programme contains both an initial headline sequence (at the very beginning of the programme) and a medial headline sequence (occurring about half-way through; see Table 1).¹

Table 1.

The distribution of news items and news headlines of BBC News at Ten (unit: n).

Periods	Editions	Headlines	Coming up headlines	News items
First	09 January 2012	4	1	12
	10 January 2012	4	1	9
	11 January 2012	4	1	11
	12 January 2012	5	1	11
	13 January 2012	5	1	8
	Total	22	5	51
Second	07 January 2013	5	1	12
	08 January 2013	5	1	9
	09 January 2013	5	1	12
	10 January 2013	5	1	10
	11 January 2013	5	1	11
	Total	25	5	54

We first adopt a quantitative analysis of the distribution of the discourse patterns of the news headlines in order to sketch out an overall picture of sequential positioning of the headlines. Then we consider the discourse patterns in more detail by focusing primarily on their sequential organisation using some elements of discourse analysis as well as drawing on a Conversation Analytic approach.

The first point to note is that there is a degree of variation in our sample between news programmes regarding the number of items that make up the bulletin, ranging from 8 items to 12. At the same time, however, the number of initial headlines does not vary in line with the number of bulletin items. Instead, they remain fairly constant – five, sometimes four, whatever the number of items. In the case of our sample, the medial headline also remains constant – simply one (upcoming) headline per programme. This immediately marks out television headlines as different from print (or typographic) headlines, where – in the latter case – each item must carry a headline. For television, in other words, several news items are not ‘headlined’ at all, either at the beginning or in the middle of the programme. One reason for this may be time pressure: if every story had to be headlined, the headlines themselves would take up a disproportionate amount of time within the bulletin’s running order – equivalent to a whole news item. Second, given that the day’s news has to be compressed within at most 12 items, there is a clear implication that these are the most important news items of the day. Whereas print headlines support selectivity by the reader, in the case of television, the items have already been pre-selected for their relevance to the audience. The only choice open to the viewer is to watch or not to watch.

Components of news headlines

Television news headlines take various forms. Some consist of one or two independent free clauses or sentences; some may consist simply of words, groups or non-finite clauses; still others may involve a visual accompaniment such as a pre-recorded sequence from the news item’s later report as a kind of visual quotation. Yet underlying these differences in form is a standard array of components that remains constant across different news bulletins, news items and news presenters. As observed by Montgomery (2007: 82), a news headline usually consists of two key elements making up a two-part structure, consisting of a heading and a supplement. The heading is a general statement, referring forwards to the news item, making up the first part of the structure. The supplement is a subsidiary part and functions to expand or qualify the heading. The following elaborates on how the heading and the supplement are formed.

The heading

The heading of a news headline serves to indicate the essential information of the news story to be reported. They are realised by the following three syntactic patterns: groups, non-finite clauses and finite clauses. Thus, a heading consisting of a group can be exemplified as follows: ‘Violence in Northern Ireland’; a heading consisting of a non-finite clause can be exemplified as follows: ‘Measuring the coalition’s performance so far’; and a heading consisting of a grammatically complete unit (clause or sentence) may be exemplified as follows: ‘Three Kurdish activists are shot dead in Paris’. Table 2 illustrates the frequency of these three heading patterns employed in BBC News at Ten.

Table 2.

The frequency of heading patterns in BBC News at Ten (unit: n).

Periods	Finite clauses	Groups	Non-finite clauses	Total
First	16	9	2	27
(%)	59.3	33.3	7.4	100.0
Second	17	9	4	30
(%)	56.7	30.0	13.3	100.0
Total	33	18	6	57
(%)	57.9	31.6	10.5	100.0

It shows that headings in BBC News at Ten are mainly constructed with finite clauses (57.9%) and groups (31.6%), supplemented with a slightly smaller share of non-finite clauses (10.5%). Furthermore, it appears that there are few differences between the two periods, though the proportion differs in using non-finite clauses (7.4% in the first period and 13.3% in the second period). It is therefore safe to say that they are probably three of the basic linguistic patterns employed in most of television news headlines.

Group

Some headings consist of only a nominal group (NG), as in Extracts (1) and (2) (in bold):

(1) (BBC News at Ten, 13 January 2012)

1
2

PR(vo):

A series of defeats for the Government in
the Lords (.) on welfare changes for the
disabled (.) and long-term sick (.)

(2) (BBC News at Ten, 11 January 2012)

1
2
3

PR(vo):

Plans to cut child benefit for better off
families (.) the Prime Minister acknowledges
it’s unfair for some (.)

On the other hand some consist of a prepositional group (PG), as in Extract (3) (in bold):

(3) (BBC News at Ten, 7 January 2013)

1
2
3

PR(vo):

And behind the scenes of a major new
exhibition by the man dubbed ‘Britain’s
greatest living artist’ (.)

It is possible by means of an NG to encode an action without using a verb or process word. In Extract (1), for example, the whole headline is composed of a simple NG (‘a series of defeats for the Government in the Lords’). This NG presents a series of processes which could have been encoded as ‘the Government has been defeated in the Lords’ in a ‘sentence-like’ fashion.

Most group headings, however, are accompanied with visual footage that functions to illustrate what is being said in the verbal track. This is important in terms of intelligibility, especially for PG headings. Take Extract (3), for example. Its heading is a simple PG, that is, ‘behind the scenes of a major new exhibition’. We may feel quite puzzled over this heading if we fail to see the footage that shows at the same time a large art gallery hall. However, the complementary footage of the scene along with the elliptical expression is able to inform the viewers of the event on the one hand and establish a sense of closeness between the viewers and the event (Lorenzo-Dus, 2009) on the other. What is more, such headings can serve as bait for the viewers ‘to watch more’. As Montgomery (2007: 82) points out, they are ‘cataphoric headings, projecting forward to the immediately following discourse, which then provides further material to supplement their meaning’.

Non-finite clause

Headings can also be non-finite, moodless clauses. In Extract (4) the heading is a non-finite, passive-voice clause in which the copula (‘was’) is omitted:

(4) (BBC News at Ten, 7 January 2013)

1
2
3

PR (vo):

The seven-year-old boy murdered by his
mother for failing to learn passages from the
Koran (.)

Verb-ing initiated clauses are also common in the heading, such as in Extracts (5) to (7) (underlined):

(5) (BBC News at Ten, 12 January 2012)

1
2

PR (vo):

Cashing in on bad play (.) the first English
cricketer to admit spot-fixing during a game (.)

(6) (BBC News at Ten, 11 January 2012)

1
2

PR (vo):

And backing a winner (.) the new debate on
priorities for the British industry (.)

(7) (BBC News at Ten, 9 January 2013)

1
2
3

PR (vo):

Measuring the coalition’s performance so far
(.) a new document that shows targets met
and targets missed (.)

By non-finite clause, subsidiary information is omitted (such as the copula in Extract (4)). In so doing, not only is the essential information highlighted but it also saves the time. In addition, the use of non-finite clauses such as verb-ing structure can create a sense of nowness; that is, by using present progressive particles, it exhibits an effect of immediacy, indicating that what is reported is happening ‘now’, as in Extracts (5) to (7). Furthermore, non-finite clauses, just like groups, are characteristic of conversationalised discourse with which journalists interact with the audience in a live and informal way (Fairclough, 1992, 1994).

Finite clause

A finite clause can be analysed based on Halliday’s (1976, 1994 [1985]) notion of transitivity. The role of transitivity within his ideational function is to represent actions, events, experiences, things or ideas through different processes such as material, verbal, mental and relational. Headings in our data involve two main types of transitivity processes: material and verbal. A material process may be that of a middle construction as in Extract (8). Here, the whole headline contains just one single clause in which the subject ‘another High Street name (.) the camera chain Jessops’ acts as a goal:

(8) (BBC News at Ten, 9 January 2013)

1
2

PR(vo):

Another High Street name (.) the camera chain
Jessops (.) goes into administration with 2000 jobs at risk

Alternatively, it may be an agent–goal type, as in Extract (9):

(9) (BBC News at Ten, 9 January 2013)

1
2

PR(vo):

They are still fighting the wildfires in parts of
Australia as one family describe their remarkable escape

The heading in Extract (9) consists of agent (‘they’) + process (‘fight’) + goal (‘wildfires’), accompanied with a booster (‘still’) and a circumstance (‘in parts of Australia’). As a result, complex messages are condensed into a single short sentence.

Some headings consist of verbal processes. By a verbal process, journalists attribute the accounts to ‘a third party’, thereby maintaining a neutral and detached position (Clayman, 1988: 484; Montgomery, 2007: 213). It is in effect a practice of quotation – often of sources (Zelizer, 1989). In Extract (10), for example, the heading is a passive clause denoting a verbal process. The process itself is an act of asking, the sayer is an anonymous third party and the verbiage is ‘to step down’. In this process, ‘two senior executives’ are foregrounded as the goal, hinting that a legal charge would be brought against them. However, the force of the act (‘asking’) has been assuaged with a hedge ‘may’, and it thus lowers the modality of the statement and mitigates the presenter’s commitment to the verbal process. More importantly, by attributing the act of asking to an anonymous third party, the programme detaches itself from the verbiage:

(10) (BBC News at Ten, 9 January 2013)

1
2

PR (vo):

Two senior executives at RBS may be asked to
step down because of the Bank’s involvement in rigging a key interest rate

The supplement

The supplement of a news headline is intended to provide more information to amplify the heading. A typical supplement consists of such components as specification, highlighting, closing and transition. Specification refers to the way the heading is elaborated, highlighting serves to emphasise certain information, closing serves to close the headline and transition refers to the way the presenter signals the move from the present headline to the next. Table 3 shows the frequency of these components used in BBC News at Ten, based on the data from 9 to 13 January 2012 (the first period) and those from 7 to 11 January 2013 (the second period).

Table 3.

The frequency of supplement components in BBC News at Ten (unit: n).

Periods	Specification	Highlighting	Closing	Transition^a	Total
First	14	11	8	10	27
(%)	51.9	40.7	29.6	37.0
Second	18	9	4	10	30
(%)	60.0	30.0	13.3	33.3
Total	32	20	12	20	57
(%)	56.1	35.1	21.1	35.1

Since what are concerned here are mainly the verbal messages in the news headlines, this table excludes the audiovisual transitional signals such as the sound of drumbeats used in BBC news.

Table 3 shows that BBC News at Ten adopts a balanced distribution of the supplement patterns. The specification occupied about 56.1%, closing occupied 21.1% and both highlighting and transition accounted for 35.1%. This suggests that BBC news not only emphasises information dissemination (such as the use of specification), but also tries to align itself with the audience (as evidenced by the use of highlighting, closing and transition). As with all headlines, the task is as much concerned with establishing relevance and interest as with conveying information. And this task is all the more acute in broadcasting where ratings and share of the audience are a constant source of concern for the broadcaster.

Specification

Specification provides extra information to clarify the heading. Extract (11) contains a very general heading. To make it specific, the supplement first refers to an unknown participant (i.e. ‘a senior police officer’) with a proper noun (‘April Casburn’) at line 3 and then explains the main event with a cause statement (‘offered confidential information on hacking investigation to the News of the World’) at lines 3–4:

(11) (BBC News at Ten, 9 January 2013)

1234

PR(dva):PR(vo):

Tonight at ten (.) a senior police officer is the first to beconvicted in the wake of the phone hacking scandal (.)April Casburn offered confidential information on the hackinginvestigation to the News of the World (.)

The specification provides a clarification of the information presented in the heading. In general, however, there are constraints on providing too much detail in the headline. Some headlines are deliberately under-specified for the time being so that they can be regarded as bait or suspense to engage the audience. And usually, a lengthy specification only occurs in the first news headline, as the most important and/or newsworthy news of the day.

Highlighting

‘Highlighting’ refers to the practice of calling attention to specific aspects of the reported event. This kind of supplement is used in at least three ways. First is the use of news footage. In many cases, a headline is delivered with the presenter’s voice-over alongside visual images. Those visual images commonly highlight aspects of the prospective news event. Highlighting may also use sensational expressions such as ‘still burning’, ‘major emerging threat’, ‘swirling (.) vicious wind’, ‘soaring temperatures (.) 45 degrees’ and ‘a sudden change in the wind’ in Extract (12) (underlined):

(12) (BBC News at Ten, 8 January 2013)

123456

PR(vo):RR(dva):

In Australia (.) wildfires are still burning andthere is a major emerging threat in New SouthWales (.)The swirling (.) vicious winds (.) the soaringtemperatures (.) 45 degrees (.) And at themoment (.) there has been a sudden change inthe wind

Last, and prominently, is the use of video-based sound bites, which occur usually in the first news headline. This can also be illustrated in Extract (12), where the headline inserts a correspondent’s direct visual address (lines 3-6). A sound bite is the most important information extracted from an interview or talk. By inserting it into the headline, voice can be used as a technique for dramatising some essential property or characteristic of the news item. It offers not just the event itself but some form of reaction to it. Indeed, in some cases the sound bite is the event itself (‘Donald Trump says, “Torture works”’).

Closing

Just like a ‘coda’ in narrative (Labov, 1972: 365), closing signals the end of a headline and brings the audience ‘up-to-date’ (Montgomery, 1991: 152). In BBC news, closing is usually realised by meta-talks (Schiffrin, 1980), which function to project the present headline onto the prospective news item, as the following examples illustrate:

We have reactions as the coalition government prepares to set out the legal framework for a referendum.

We will have the latest from Westminster and Holyrood as the debate intensifies.

We will be asking how damaging the case has been for the Metropolitan Police.

We’ll be asking where the ultimate responsibility lies – with the clinics or the regulator.

Some linguistic features in these examples stand out as distinctive. First, the presenters tend to use first-person plural reference (‘we’) to orient to their institutional identities as a journalist. This can be taken as a type of meta-communication (Bateson, 1987 [1955]), whereby the presenter shifts from the presenter-identity (presenting the news) to the communicator-identity (communicating with the audience). Second is the use of the future tense. By using the future tense, some upcoming actions are projected, serving to point the audience to the prospective news report. Third is the use of question markers (such as ‘where’, ‘how damaging’). These question markers form into some puzzles or suspense, functioning to engage the audience. Finally, nearly all the closings are formulated with a form of ‘X does Y as P does Q’ (Montgomery, 2007: 82). By this form, complex messages can be compressed into one single sentence on the one hand, and the reported event can be projected as up-to-date on the other.

Transition

Transition in the news headlines of BBC News at Ten falls into four types. First, there is the standard preface – ‘tonight at ten’. For each edition of this programme, the news headlines always start with this remark, a ritualistic practice for opening the programme. Second is the use of ‘also tonight’ at the end of the first headline. The remark ‘also tonight’ signals the transition from the first headline to the rest. This expression also suggests that the first headline probably concerns the most important or newsworthy news of the day and that other items in the running order are by implication subsidiary to it; at the same time, however, it suggests that some (but not all) other items are also significant enough to be warrant a headline even though they are not as important as the first. The third is the use of ‘and’ at the initial position of the last news headline. The conjunction ‘and’ not only signals a transition between the previous and the present headlines, but also acts as a concluding sign, showing that the next news headline is the last to be presented. Finally, there are drumbeats between headlines. These drumbeats not only connote an air of urgency and authoritativeness, but also mark a transition between two adjacent headlines.

Headline as summary: Forecasting a newsworthy event

Thus far we have seen that various television news headlines share a common set of patterns that display something of their institutional character. Yet television news headlines amount to more than the occurrence of these particular patterns. They are constructed as such to meet particular communicative purposes. It is generally held to be the case that headlines offer a summary of the most important details of news items to be reported (Bell, 1991; Montgomery, 2007; Seo, 2013; Van Dijk, 1988), but in a way that emphasises aspects of its news value. A print news headline may meet this requirement with quite complex syntactic structures (Bell, 1991). A television news headline, however, seldom employs such complex structures. Instead, it tends to package the essential information into simple expressions with strategies such as nominalisation and condensation, as we noted earlier.

Nominalisation

Nominalisation is a standard practice in formulating a television news headline, especially in constructing the heading and specifying the supplement. The headline in Extract (13) mentions two events, namely, President Obama’s new appointments and the Republicans’ objections to the appointments. The first event is formulated using an NG (‘new appointments by President Obama’), rather than a clause, which might represent the process of appointing:

(13) (Originally Extract (4))

PR(vo):

New appointments by President Obama infuriatedRepublicans who say they will try to block them (.)

This nominalisation certainly enables economy of expression. It is noticeable also that the headline gives no detail about the appointments themselves (of whom, to what), but situates this rather vague detail in the conflictual space of partisan, two-party politics (‘infuriated Republicans’) and focuses instead on reaction (‘who say they will try to block them’). It is these details that foreground the operative news values for the event (Elite persons or groups, Negativity, Power, Conflict).

Condensation

Condensation refers to the process wherein two or more expressions are combined into a single expression. By condensation, journalists can generalise a complex event with a simple sentence or even an NG or PG, hence saving the time and space, on the one hand, and highlighting the important information, on the other. As we have seen, some television news headlines contain solely the heading, realised with a simple expression in which complex messages are condensed. In Extract (14), the headline is made up of an NG, which is modified with complex messages such as the main event (‘violence’), place (‘in Belfast’), time (‘this evening’) and the cause (‘the row about flying the union flag’):

(14) (BBC News at Ten, 7 January 2013)

PR(vo):

More violence this evening in Belfast in thecontinuing row about flying the union flag (.)

Non-finite clauses are also commonly used to condense the messages. In Extract (15), a passive-voice structure ‘was murdered’ is shortened into a non-finite clause through the deletion of the copula ‘was’ (line 1):

(15) (Originally Extract (4))

PR(vo):

The seven-year-old boy murdered by his mother forfailing to learn passages from the Koran (.)

It is also likely that a headline consists of a single finite clause wherein important information is condensed into the subordinate clause, as in Extract (16):

(16) (BBC News at Ten, 7 January 2013)

PR(vo):

And Britain’s oldest man who lived through twoworld wars and saw 24 Prime Ministers has died (.)

The subject of the main clause in Extract (16) is modified with two attributive clauses (‘who lived through two world wars’ and ‘[who] saw 24 Prime Ministers’) and with two phrasal attributives (‘Britain’s’ and ‘oldest’). In so doing, four independent messages (i.e. the man’s nationality, age, lifetime and death) are condensed into one single sentence.

Headline as trailer: Engaging the audience

A good news headline not only summarises the news story but also serves to engage the audience. It goes beyond the function of summary and acts as a trailer to project the headline information onto the upcoming new report (Montgomery, 2007). It achieves this communicative purpose with at least four discourse strategies: using poetic expressions, formulating puzzles, inserting video-based sound bites and foregrounding those elements which accentuate the news value of the item.

Using poetic expressions

Poetic expressions are those whose syntactic and verbal forms exhibit prosodic effects such as rhyme, antithesis and rhythm. Usually, poetic expressions are used not only to summarise news stories, but also to appeal to the audience due to their aesthetic and sensational effects. Extract (17) presents a wildfire disaster. In order to highlight the extreme effects of the event, the news presentation and the correspondent describe the fire with a string of sensational words such as ‘emerging’, ‘swirling’, ‘vicious’, ‘soaring’ and ‘sudden’. What is more, this headline employs a tandem of verb-ing expressions that sound rhymed and rhythmical, such as ‘burning’, ‘swirling’ and ‘soaring’ (in bold):

(17) (Originally Extract (12))

12345

PR(vo):RR(dva):

In Australia (.) wildfires are still burning and there is amajor emerging threat in New South Wales (.)The swirling (.) vicious winds (.) the soaringtemperatures (.) 45 degrees (.) and at the moment (.)there has been a sudden change in the wind (.)

A poetic effect can also be located in Extract (18), which contains a two-part parallel structure based around a contrast (‘targets met and targets missed’) at line 2. This parallel structure consists of Noun + Verb and the contrast is foregrounded by alliteration of the contrasted items ‘met’ and ‘missed’. As a result, it creates an effect of resonance and is likely to appeal to the audience:

(18) (BBC News at Ten, 9 January 2013)

PR(vo):

Measuring the coalition’s performance so far (.) a newdocument that shows targets met and targets missed

Formulating puzzles

Formulating puzzles is a common practice in television news headlines. Journalists tend to embed puzzles into headlines to create a sense of suspense. A puzzle may be a question or a statement that entails a question. In Extract (19), for instance, the headline concerns a potential police investigation concerning allegations that the British security service, MI6, was complicit in torturing two Libyan men. If we just look at the heading (lines 1–2), we may feel puzzled at quite a few points. For instance, who made the allegations? Why were there such allegations? What was MI6’s response? How did the investigation proceed? And what were the consequences? The news presentation itself does not solve these puzzles immediately. Instead, it postpones them by providing some other information in the supplement. The supplement does indeed provide some information about the main event mentioned in the heading, namely the participants (‘we’ (the two Libyan men) and ‘the British’), the event (i.e. ‘the British were deeply involved’ at lines 5–7), and the minor event (‘Two Libyan men say they were abducted and […] tortured in Gaddafi’s prisons’ at lines 3–4). These messages can be seen as partial answers to the puzzles (or specification of the heading). However, rather than solving those puzzles, the presenter goes on to mention another event that goes against what the two men had said (lines 8-9), thus creating further puzzles for the audience:

(19) (BBC News at Ten, 12 January 2012)

1234567891011

PR(dva):PR(vo):A man:PR(vo):PR(dva):PR(dva):

Tonight at ten (.) MI6 faces police investigation intoallegations of complicity and torture (.)Two Libyan men say they were abducted and flown toTripoli (.) where they were tortured in Gaddafi’s prisons (.)We don’t just have the smoking gun (.) we haven’t thesmoking missile in these cases (.) You just can’t avoidthe fact that the British were deeply involved (.)But in a separate case of Binyam Mohamed and another terror suspecttortured abroad (.) there will be no charges against MI5 or MI6 (.)We’ll be looking at the investigation for Britain’s secret service (.)Also tonight

Those puzzles, of course, cannot be solved in the headline per se; otherwise, it would not be a headline but a detailed news report. Yet those puzzles are not inserted at random. They are designed as such to attract the viewing audience’s attention and to invite them to watch more about the prospective news report.

A standard journalistic practice of formulating a puzzle is not to provide any answers to it until the referenced news item occurs, as in Extract (20):

(20) (BBC News at Ten, 9 January 2013)

12345

PR(vo):Drumbeats:PR(vo):

Measuring the coalition’s performance so far (.) a newdocument that shows targets met and targets missed(.5)Another High Street name (.) the camera chainJessops (.) goes into administration (.) with 2000 jobs at risk

This example contains two independent headlines, each involving some puzzles. The first presupposes the questions of ‘what is met and what is missed’ (lines 1–2). The second might trigger questions such as ‘what caused Jessops’ bankruptcy?’ and ‘what will be the consequences?’ (lines 4–5). These questions are, like a kind of bait, designed to appeal to the audience. With these questions, curious audiences are likely to stick to the programme and wait for the journalists to explain further.

Inserting video-based sound bites

A newly released movie may advertise itself by using selected visual highlights edited together to form trailers to attract potential viewers. Similarly, television news headlines tend to insert video-based sound bites to engage the viewing audience. Extract (21) concerns a conflict between the British and Scottish governments over the issue of Scottish independence. To make this headline appealing, the presenter not only formulates the conflict with his own words, but also highlights it with video-based sound bites that dramatise the opposing views of the two contending parties (one at lines 5-7 and the other at lines 10-12). Using direct video quotations in the form of contrasting sound bites from recognisable and representative persons enables the broadcaster not only to dramatise the positions at stake, but also simultaneously to occupy the middle ground between them, thus preserving its commitment to balance, impartiality, neutrality and fairness:

(21) (BBC News at Ten, 9 January 2012)

12345678910111213141516

PR(dva):PR(vo):Cameron:PR(vo):A woman:PR(dva):

Tonight at ten (.) David Cameron tries to forcethe pace on the question of Scottish independence (.)He wants a referendum sooner rather thanlater (.) based on a simple yes or no to leaving the United Kingdom (.)Businesses are asking (.) er (.) is Scotland gonna be a part of the UnitedKingdom (.) are they going to stay together (.) should I invest (.) We arebeginning to see companies asking those questions (.)But the Scottish Government says it’s blatant interference andMr. Cameron should back off (.)The more a Tory-led Government tries to interfere in Scottishdemocracy (.) the more support for independence will continue toincrease (.) because I think that is the caseWe have reactions as the coalition governmentprepares to set out the legal framework for areferendum (.)also tonight (.)

In contrast to BBC News at Ten, some news bulletins such as CCTV’s News Simulcast² rarely uses video-based sound bites in news headlines. Rather, it presents headlines often solely in direct visual address from the presenter. The headlines thus sound monotonous and prosaic, and their appeal can only rely on the content of the news event and the staged performance of the news presenters.

Accentuating conflicts

Conflict is the clash between two opposite parties or two simultaneous but incompatible positions. Conflict entails newsworthiness. It serves ‘not only to dramatize individual events but also [to] provide overarching frames for organising diverse material’ (Montgomery, 2007: 7). In order to foreground newsworthiness of the event, journalists tend to accentuate conflicts in the headlines. In Extract (21), the presenter starts the headline with the Cameron government’s suggestion of having an earlier referendum with a simple yes-or-no vote over Scottish independence. Then he inserts an opposite voice at lines 8-9, saying that the Scottish Government considers Cameron’s suggestion as ‘blatant interference’ in Scotland’s ‘own’ political affairs. Accordingly, a sharp political conflict between the British and Scottish governments is foregrounded and dramatized by the use of contrasting (and opposing) voices. Such a presentation of opposing voices is also noticeable in Extract (22). In this headline, the presenter first provides an overarching voice, saying that the Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) providers should be responsible for replacing the defective PIP implants (lines 1–2). Then he presents an opposite voice from the PIP providers, which is first provided by the presenter (lines 3–4) and then articulated directly by the PIP providers’ spokesperson (lines 5-6), saying that it was not their responsibility, but that of the government’s agency. There is also a third voice, which is first expressed with the presenter’s voice-over (lines 7-8) and then articulated with a victim’s direct visual address (lines 9-11), warning that there would be claims for compensation from the providers. As a result, three different voices combine to form into three different conflicts, namely, the PIP providers versus the government agencies, the providers versus the victims and the victims versus the government:

(22) (BBC News at Ten, 11 January 2012)

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PR(dva):PR(vo):A man:PR(vo):A woman:PR(dva):

Tonight at ten (.) more pressure on the privateclinics responsible for thousands of breast implants (.)The providers are told they have a duty to replacedefective PIP implants (.) but they say it’s not their fault (.)This is a massive problem created by the Government’s agency and theymust accept moral responsibility (.) they must do something for patients (.)Thousands of women are affected and they’re warning the privatecompanies they won’t give up (.)They are gonna lose a lot of money over this (.) but rightly so (.) theyshould lose a lot of money over it(.) they’ve made a lot of money over it (.) so they should also lose (.)We’ll be asking where the ultimateresponsibility lies – with the clinics or theregulator (.)

The conflicts discussed above can be seen as socially bound clashes between different opposing groups and parties. There are also conflicts better understood as between differing cognitive states where one is taken as unexpected or out of the ordinary. We can explain this latter type of conflict by drawing upon Harvey Sack’s notion of Membership Categorisation Device (MCD; Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2008; Montgomery, 2007; Sacks, 1992). MCD refers to the way we ‘describe, identify or make reference to others or ourselves’ (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2008: 35). For example, a man can be categorised as a ‘father’ or ‘teacher’ based on the social roles he plays. A membership category is bound by conventional activities. That is, a mother as a particular category is assumed to perform activities appropriate to that category. A mother, for instance, is conventionally assumed to nurture and care for their child or infant while a teacher is supposed to educate students. Events in news headlines, however, are not always category-bound. As Montgomery (2007) suggests, ‘a noticeable feature of the headlines […] is that the activities or actions linked with the selected membership are not within the range of normal category-bound activities for that membership. Instead, the actions are discrepant with the MCD’ (p. 79). This point manifests in Extract (23):

(23) (Originally Extract (4))

PR (vo):

The seven-year-old boy murdered by his motherfor failing to learn passages from the Koran (.)

A mother is supposed to take care of her child, but here in Extract (23) the mother is reported to have killed her ‘seven-year-old boy’ (line 1). This is quite unexpected and out of line with the set of activities conventionally associated with the category of mother. This contradiction creates a sharp cognitive conflict with the expectation of the viewing audience. How could a mother kill her own child? What had happened to her? Was she crazy? What was the consequence? To solve these puzzles, the audience needs to watch more about this event, which is obviously one of the communicative purposes the headline is supposed to achieve.

Discussion and conclusion

We have seen that there is a limited set of formal patterns comprising the organisation of television headlines which are realised in a basic structure, namely {heading (+supplement)}. We have also noted that unlike headlines in the print medium, television headlines are positioned in their own dedicated slot at the beginning (and in the middle) of the bulletin. This slot has itself its own particular structure and its own particular sound effects in which the transition from one headline to another is marked by something like a gong. In addition, there is also a drumbeat effect that may continue in the background right through this section. Thus, in compositional terms the relation of headlines to news items on television is quite different from the relation of headlines to items in print. In print, the relationship is one of immediate contiguity – for all stories. On television the relationship is one of separation – or temporal displacement; and indeed, some stories will receive no headline at all. This immediately marks out the television headline as affording quite different communicative possibilities and functions from print (typographic) headlines.

Print headlines, at this stage in the evolution of news discourse, seem in Dor’s (2003) terms to offer the opportunity of optimising the relevance for readers of the items or stories that they choose to read, whether of written news online or of the printed article. In an era of massive availability of news on different platforms, the users of news are forced to be selective; and the written headline provides the necessary clues for exercising this capacity. Broadcast headlines, however, operate in a quite different medium with different affordances of sound and vision, including the sound bite and use of the visual track for illustration. Most fundamentally, we have to remember that television news headlines (and broadcast news headlines more generally) are written to be spoken. Some of the properties that we have noted, the simple two-part structure with elliptical realisations, for instance, are undoubtedly related to the constraints and affordances of the spoken medium. Live television news is broadcast as a live flow of items and it is not easy for a viewer to select within the flow which items to attend to and which to ignore. The headlines offer a kind of guarantee of relevance for the programme as a whole.

However, there is more at work here than the simple writing/speech dichotomy. Television news headlines are realised by an embodied voice. The presenter onscreen speaks – for the most part – in direct visual address to the audience. Indeed, we can say, following Frosh (2009), that the news presenter’s direct look to camera is itself the characteristic look of television (quite unlike, for instance, that of another visual medium such as cinema). This places television headlines on a quite different axis of relationship between the news institution and its audience than print headlines. Newspaper headlines are there to be ‘overlooked’ by potential readers but do not issue from any easily identifiable source. Indeed, some commentators have suggested that they ventriloquise each particular newspaper’s sense of the communal voice of its own readership (Conboy, 2006). For television, however, we see an individual person speaking as if to us. The presenter herself may not be directly addressing the viewer verbally in headlines (though presenters routinely greet the audience around the beginning of the programme). But the overall effect is of the embodied and personalised voice. The news presenter is the institutional voice of the broadcaster in the domain of the news, and viewers have, thereby, a personal source mediating to them the institution’s account of the world. One of the curiosities of this kind of participation framework (Goffman, 1981) where the news presenter is animator but not author or principal is that headlines, like the news itself, are both personal and impersonal at the same time. They speak, as Scannell (2000, 2014) puts it, one-to-many but for anybody as somebody.

In addition, positioned as headlines are, at some distance from the item to which they refer, they need to be both reasonably self-sufficient, at the same time as projecting interest forward into the coming programme. In this respect they share something of the characteristic of trailers. They need to make a degree of sense on their own terms while stimulating interest in aspects of the programme to follow. This they do not by the simple act of summary, but by incorporating sufficient details of the news items to which they relate, so as to display the editorial reasoning that went into their selection and their ordering. In effect, they highlight or even dramatise, often in the supplement, aspects of the news value of the item, whether this be contrast, conflict, the voices of the powerful or the unexpectedness of event.

In these ways we have attempted to demonstrate that television news headlines – despite the common name – are quite different in their design, their structure and their form from print news headlines. Ultimately, they take shape in live and staged performance for the viewing audience. As pointers towards significant material in the upcoming flow of the programme, their purpose is to engage the viewing audience for the duration of the broadcast.

Footnotes

Appendix 1 Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Macau (through grant MYRG133 (Y1-L4)-FSH12-MM) for the research that underpinned this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Martin Montgomery is Chair Professor in English and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Macau, having previously held positions at the University of Birmingham, University of Bristol, University of Glamorgan and the University of Strathclyde. He is the author, co-author or editor of several books including Studies in Discourse Analysis (1981/2014; co-edited with Malcolm Coulthard), An Introduction to Language and Society (3rd edn, 2008) and The Discourse of Broadcast News (2007). He founded the Ross Priory International Seminar for the Study of Broadcast Talk in 1992 and has written extensively on the subject for journals such as Media Culture & Society, Discourse Studies, Journalism Studies, Communication Review and Discourse & Communication.

Debing Feng is Lecturer in Linguistics at Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, China. He received his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Macau. His research interests include sociolinguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, discourse analysis and conversation analysis. His recent publications include ‘National voice: A discourse analysis of China Central Television’s News Simulcast’ in Discourse & Communication, 2013, 7(3) and ‘Identifying the participants: Reference in television news’ in Visual Communication, 2016, 15(2).

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