Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Laura Hazard Owen notes that Slate isn’t sending an article’s headline to tweets generated by its tweet button. Instead, it’s setting a different, more social friendly string — “This Is a Terrible Way to Commemorate a Major Civil Rights Victory” becomes “The New Yorker’s Bert and Ernie Cover Is a Terrible Way to Commemorate a Major Civil Rights Victory,” for instance.
As she points out, nothing new — it’s as simple as changing the language in your tweet button template — but worthwhile anyway. (In WordPress, you’d be replacing a call to get_the_title() with whatever custom field you set up on your backend.) And as Slate’s Katherine Goldstein says:
One of our bloggers said that he used to spend time doing custom headlines for Twitter and then he started making those custom headlines his regular headlines. Those are the kinds of conversations and thought processes we’re really encouraging our editors to have.
