Headlines have never been more important. In a news infoscape riddled with affective polarization, headlines help focus public opinion and offer much needed balance. Yet they exist in a system that slowly strips them of substance and renders them irrelevant.

Jean Cocteau had famously quipped that “style is a simple way of saying complicated things.” I have always thought of headlines as definitive of a newspaper approach, affect, and, yes, style. Headlines frame an issue. They work like a photographer’s lens, drawing our attention to a unique point of view. But in a world dominated by feels, reels, and POVs, they blend in too easily. They follow trends, often mimicking tendencies across media industries. This was not always the case.

Tabloids were known for their sensational headlines that typically occupied the entire front page. Washington Post headlines had an unmistakable D.C. politico veneer. The New York Times headlines rested upon the famous “all the news that is fit to print” slogan, reminding the reader that one might get their news anywhere, but the Times had a unique eye for telling a story. I could go on: The International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, The Wall Street Journal, and countless others. You could block the newspaper name out and one would still be able to tell which paper that headline belonged to. That is the world many grew up in.

Headlines have to be short, clear, and precise. So many things can go wrong and do. Journalism professors can share countless stories of headline fiascos to wake up any bored college student.

The unique style of headlines has been swept up in the attention economy of clickbait. I’m not suggesting that headlines were never about the business of attention. They have always been about selling the paper — selling the brand, the story, getting subscriptions and advertising rate hikes. Nothing wrong with that. Good journalism costs money.

News audiences are now too savvy for clickbait. Clicking is a transient affective reaction that no longer means anything for viewer retention. The stats behind it are meaningless. But a headline with a distinct style — well, that can reveal so much about the person who wrote it and the person who reads it.

Will headlines be composed by AI, like so many things these days? Perhaps. Will they be replaced by imagery that ushers in the Clickbait 2.0 era? They already have been. Will that imagery be synthetic, that is, a composite of polymorphic media? This has happened. Deepfakes are the land mines of the news business.

Could we use AI otherwise? I am tempted by this idea. AI did not kill the headline. The news industry grossly underestimated the internet and that had disastrous results for the news economy. News businesses thought the news website could be used to advertise the newspaper. It turned out it’s the other way round. Let’s not repeat the same mistake by misusing the various forms of AI that we have at our disposal. If AI can render what it felt like to read a solid New York Times headline, I am curious about what humans consulting AI instead of offloading on AI might come up with. Then perhaps we might get that short sentence that presents a simple way of saying complicated things. AI cannot make style, but it could help spark up ideas within a human imagination clogged up with banalities. News, after all, by definition, can never be banal.

Happy next year!