- ments headlines should create interest and lead to the
sale of the paper. By arousing the reader's curiosity and at the same time partially satisfying it, the head, when skillfully written, attracts the reader's attention and influences him to read the story.
A newspaper that aims to have large street sales will naturally take advantage of the advertising element in the heads, by making them as attractive as possible. In fact, the efforts of some newspapers of this class to make the most powerful appeal possible, have led to extreme forms of headlines with great black type and with varicolored effects. In general, morning papers and evening papers with regular subscribers are less inclined to employ large heads for advertising their news than are those evening papers with several street editions that seek to have large sales. Large heads extending across several columns and printed in green, red, or black ink set forth the latest phases of the news in a manner well calculated to catch the eye as the paper is displayed on the news stand or in the hands of the newsboy. As in advertising in general there is always a temptation to make alluring statements at the expense of truth, so in headline advertisement there is a tendency to exaggerate and magnify in order to catch the unwary reader.
Large Heads and "Yellow Journalism." Since the more sensational papers have taken advantage of this advertising element and have yielded at times to the temptation to exaggerate or even to misrepresent, as is not unheard of in advertising generally, large display effects in headlines have come to be associated in the popular mind with so-called "yellow journalism." The connection between the two is by no means inevitable, however, for large headlines need not be any more sensational or inaccurate than smaller ones, and
