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One possibility is to involve the readers more. Mind you, the approach I’m going to suggest would only work for online content and falls flat for print media.

Facebook has a button below every wall post for “Like”. Slashdot allows users to rate comments up and down. Many dating websites have buttons saying “flag content as inappropriate” on each profile.

I believe these same principles can be applied to headlines. If each headline had a button next to it allowing users to rate the relevance and/or accuracy, the amalgamation of feedback could point human moderators to problems in an efficient fashion. There could even be a “suggest a better headline” button that would generate a popup text box.

There are two basic principles at play here:
1) Online content providers shouldn’t consider the initial publishing to be the final act. Corrections and updates should become part of the culture when content will be archived.
2) Updates are cheapest and most thorough when the audience is engaged to be a part of the process, creating a massively distributed network of free proofreaders and knowledge contributors.

Part of me wonders what individual newspapers and books would look like a week later if they were unleashed on Wikipedia with appropriate moderation and an adequate engaged fan base. I’m confident the net result would be an improvement in the rate of typos and level of accuracy.

This is much more than a side-note; it’s a wake-up call.

If headlines are the new content (and certainly the Associated Press, with their ire at Google, seems to demonstrate belief as such), then journals are going to need to be a lot more careful when they generate and publish them.

We run into issues of Authority and Relevance at this point — what is the Truth and who can be considered a canonical Source when information becomes obsolete almost the moment it’s published?

It’s an open question…

The end effect is the problem, so I retract my polemic against the theoretical writer-copyeditor who probably wasn’t the culprit in this case.

More thoughts on this soon.

Personally, though, I think this sort of thing is more common with stories about science, where there is a trope that “It’s all just a theory” (in the lay definition of “theory”) and especially food science, where “This claim will be contradicted by the next study.” Scientists speak in ever-narrower terms to try to avoid this kind of reporting, but their careful language doesn’t help generalist reporters put the study in context.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_editing

I’ve spoken with many reporter friends who have been horrified at the headlines attached to their articles… but there isn’t much they can do about it. The copy editor is rewarded for sensationalism, not accuracy.

To some extent it makes sense to have someone specialize in the clever, attention grabbing play on words commonly associated with headline writing. You’ve clearly articulated the drawbacks in that approach though.

In my opinion the best compromise would be to have journalists approve headlines written by copy editors before the article goes to publication. However, that might not be realistic in the fast paced news business — especially if reporters look forward to getting off the clock and socializing or going to sleep after submitting an article under a tight deadline.