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Understanding mindset of those culling through press releases will help you craft informative headlines. If you need a lot of words to write a clear headline, go ahead. A good guideline is to include as many of journalism's classic "Five W's" in headline as you can: who, what, when, where and why or how. To address editors' top three concerns, make sure you specify what you're promoting, who would care about it and what makes it newsworthy.
To return to three unfortunate examples found online, we can fix first specimen along these lines:
The New Underground Railroad, New Book, Helps Free Wage Slaves from Bondage With a Beginner's Introduction to Stocks, Bonds and Investing.
The second headline improves with a few more details:
HP Wheels Out Year-long Traveling Exhibition of Truck- Mounted Homes Filled with Digital Photography, Computing and Entertainment Products.
And annoyance factor disappears from third headline when we revise it as follows:
Little Kids Updates Sqwish Ball, Specialty Toy from 1990's for Age 5 and Up, With a Holographic Shimmer.
If after adding clarity, you can also inject some wordplay or fun into headline, go ahead. But media people giving your headlines just three or four seconds of attention aren't really looking for entertainment. They're on a hunt for relevance, and cuteness runs danger of getting in their way.
Marcia Yudkin is the author of the classic guide to comprehensive PR, "6 Steps to Free Publicity," now for sale in an updated edition at Amazon.com and in bookstores everywhere. She also spills the secrets on advanced tactics for today's publicity seekers in "Powerful, Painless Online Publicity," available from www.yudkin.com/powerpr.htm .