In a case of super duper small world, Patrick is a student in my lab, and Nev, the volleyball player he wrote about, prepared my taxes Saturday.

A “head” is short for headline or header, which is made up of three to six or so words with a subject and verb — usually the big type above a newspaper article. It can also be the title of a journal piece.

The subhead is short for subheadline, which goes beneath the headline and is in smaller type and uses more words but still relates to the article. (Sub means under. Think submarine, which means “under water.”) I should note that the subheadline gives more information about the article and doesn’t just repeat what the headline says. Together they answer most of the 5Ws and 1H.

For example:

HEADLINE (“head”): Troops, police attack post-quake looting

SUBHEADLINE (“subhead”): Chilean officials struggle to aid victims of a quake that killed more than 700 people.

Who: Chilean officials
What: The struggle to aid victims amidst looting
When: After the earthquake
Where: Chile
Why: Because the quake was deadly — killed more than 700 people
How: By attacking the post-quake looting

When you write your head and subhead, be sure that they sum up what’s going on with your story. Copyeditors at newspapers are typically those who write headlines, and they’re quite clever. A copyeditor I know wrote the headline, “Grinding to a Halt,” about a school’s ban on bump-and-grinding at school dances. Another wrote “Mounting Danger,” about a hiking trip gone wrong.

NOTE:
• Headlines online tend to be less creative and more straight-forward so that readers will more easily find the stories through searches.
• Those hoping their articles will be placed high on Google will use a key term in the headline, subheadline and first paragraph of the story. This is known as web or search engine optimization.
• Online, headlines change as the news develops. For example, the headline to the story above is now, “Tsunami sweeps away entire towns on Chilean coast.”

He tells us, the viewer, where he shot the photos and what camera he used to get the images.

Troy writes: “I kept low and kind of out of site so I could hold my position. My mind was so preoccupied by losing my position that I had a tough time getting sharp pictures of the skeleton start. I thought it was my camera or lens acting up at first. What it really was was concentration on the subject and keeping the focus point square on the helmet of each athlete. For anyone who thinks photography is a matter of pointing a camera and pushing a button I challenge you to try shooting skeleton.“

“There are some great examples from NPR of how well-produced audio can tell a story. I know everyone thinks of Ira Glass when this subject comes up, and I’m as big a fan of This American Life as anyone, but there are ways to do this that don’t involve mimicking that formula and sounding like a low-rent Ira Glass wannabe. There’s a guy on WBUR in Boston, David Boeri, who does amazing things with ambient audio within a more traditional NPR-type framework. He has a voice that would make you cry if you heard him read the phone book.”

(Wild West Coasters, before you turn up your noses at another East Coast-centric post, know that this man is true blood Alaska. He’s even gone whale hunting.)

Examples here, here and here.

Let me rephrase that. KENNEDY’S OBIT IS A MUST.

Also, check out these gorgeous photos by my friend Erika Schultz of the Seattle Times. The Seattle Times’ photo site also deserves attention.

For national and international photos of the day, peruse the Seattle P-I’s photo galleries on the upper right hand side. Click on “more galleries” to see the editor’s picks of the day. Or view their “In a Word” archives. The photographers were given one word as their assignment and told to depict it through photo.

The Amazin Jerks from Casey Parks on Vimeo.