The Quest for the Perfect Headline by Jordan
Teicher The best headline ever written
is “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” It
appeared on the front page of the New York Post in
1983—simple, symmetrical, and intriguing. Five words that tell a story but still compel
you to find out more. “There’s an
overwhelming amount of content being published every day, and there’s not as
big of a demand for the amount that’s published,” said Nathan Ellering, content
marketing lead for CoSchedule, a social media technology company. “What is the way to stand out for people who
have absolutely no time to read every single headline? It’s just to cut to the chase. It’s a completely different playing field
now.” But the evolution of Facebook has
complicated that playing field. Over the
last few years, publishers have had to rethink the way they approach headlines. In 2014, a leaked innovation report revealed
that homepage visitors to The New York Times dropped
from 160 million to 80 million between 2011 and 2013 while the number of
pageviews had held steady. Readers don’t
necessarily find content from homepage headlines, coming instead from social
media feeds and email newsletters. According
to data from Shareaholic, Facebook drives at least 25 percent of all traffic to
publisher sites, a figure some media analysts think could be closer to 50
percent once you account for unrecorded referral traffic from the Facebook app. https://contently.com/strategist/2016/04/25/quest-perfect-headline/
On a rainy Thursday
morning, Contently’s editorial staff
cleared our calendars for an hour to dive down the rabbit hole of
sensationalism. What we did wouldn’t
make any of our old English teachers proud:
We retitled 13 classic works of literature and did our best to rid of
them of all prestige. The Content
Strategist presents upworthy titles at https://contently.com/strategist/2016/05/16/literature-upworthy-titles/
I particularly liked
"discrimination against people who turn into insects for no reason"
promoting The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
Paraphrase from A Treacherous Paradise by Henning Mankell President Theodore Roosevelt was a hopeless shot but nevertheless, with discreet assistance,
succeeded in bagging vast numbers of buffalo, lion, leopard
and giraffe.
Skeuomorphism refers to a design principle in
which design cues are taken from the physical world. This term is most frequently applied to user
interfaces (UIs), where much of the design has traditionally aimed to recall
the real world--such as the use of folder and files images for computer filing
systems, or a letter symbol for email--probably to make computers feel more
familiar to users. However, this
approach is increasingly being criticized for its lack of ingenuity and its
failure to pioneer designs that truly harness a computer's superior
capabilities, rather than forcing it to merely mimic the behavior of a physical
object. The term skeuomorphism
is derived from the Greek words "skeuos," which means vessel or tool,
and "morphe," which means "shape." https://www.techopedia.com/definition/28955/skeuomorphism
Flat design is a type of
design that’s been stripped of any three-dimensional elements. It removes any stylistic tastes that try
to imitate the real-world equivalent of those elements. Everything that’s
part of a flat design appears as if it’s lying flat on a single surface. That’s where the name “flat design” came
from. http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2015/05/flat-design-vs-material-design-what-makes-them-different.html
Ever since
Apple released iOS 7 on September 18, 2013 there has been an ongoing
conversation about the advantages and disadvantages of Skeuomorphism vs Flat Design. The irony
to Apple’s introduction of flat design in 2013 is that Microsoft had already
been doing this since 2010 when they released Windows Phone
7. Before
Microsoft’s introduction to Metro design, mobile users had been accustomed to the more
elaborate and overused ornamental design from the original
iPhone in 2007. See graphic examples and advantages and
disadvantages of skeumorphism and flat design at https://blog.jixee.me/skeuomorphism-v-s-flat-design/
The summer of 2016 marks
the 165th anniversary of the publication of Moby-Dick. Two fascinating new books—one a historical
novel, the other nonfiction—each identify a different person as the inspiration
behind Herman Melville’s novel. In his
debut, The Whale: A Love Story, former journalist Mark
Beauregard supposes what many have speculated:
that the brief but intense friendship between Melville and Nathaniel
Hawthorne went beyond camaraderie. The novel opens on August 5, 1850,
with Melville and Hawthorne meeting for the first time while on an excursion
with mutual friends in the Berkshires.
Hawthorne is fresh off the success of The
Scarlet Letter and living in
Lenox, Massachusetts, while Melville is visiting his cousin Robert in nearby
Pittsfield. Melville’s career is waning, and he is in a bit of a rut working on
a novel about the whaling industry.
Though both are married, Melville instantly falls for the handsome,
congenial Hawthorne. Shortly afterward,
Melville moves his family to a modest farm six miles from Lenox. Hawthorne keeps Melville at arm’s length to
resist his attraction to the younger writer, and so Melville funnels his
yearning into his work. In effect,
Beauregard presents Hawthorne as Melville’s own white whale, the object of his
obsession. In Melville in Love,
Michael Shelden—a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Orwell: The Authorized Biography—presents
another candidate for Melville’s muse, one whose importance has been entirely
overlooked for the past 165 years. Among the guests at cousin Robert
Melville’s house in Pittsfield during the summer of 1850 were the Morewoods of New
York City. Sarah Morewood was the
“bookish and beautiful, intelligent and inquisitive, creative and
compassionate” wife of a wealthy merchant.
That summer, the vivacious Sarah organized picnics, hikes and other
jaunts, which Melville enthusiastically joined.
The attraction between Sarah and the dashing writer was immediate and
mutual, and Shelden asserts that Melville moved his family to Pittsfield to be
close not to Hawthorne, but to Sarah, who was in the process of purchasing
Robert’s estate. Joelle Herr https://bookpage.com/features/19930-moby-dick-one-masterpiece-two-muses#.V0cj9PkrKUk
RECENT DEATHS May 21,
2016 Jane Fawcett, born Janet Caroline
Hughes, was working as a decoder at the age of 20. Typing what seemed like gibberish into a
British Typex cipher machine modified to operate like the German Enigma
machine, she realised that the message emerging in German revealed that the
Bismarck was heading for the French port of Brest. It was this vital piece of information which
allowed the Royal Navy to track down and sink the Bismarck before she reached
French shores. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/30/jane-fawcett-obituary
May 24, 2016 Mell Lazarus,
the cartoonist behind such comcis page staples as Miss Peach and Momma passed
away at age 89. Lazarus was a past
president of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) as well as a Rueben Award
winner and an NCS Medal of Honor recipient.
http://www.comicsbeat.com/rip-mell-lazarus/
May 27, 2016 American cartoonist Franklyn Bruce Modell was born on September 6, 1917, in
Philadelphia. Frank, a graduate of the
Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, contributed over 1,400 cartoons
to The New Yorker during a period of over 50 years from 1946.
Marching Band and the Tenacity of Youth The
documentary Concrete Royalty profiles Joseph Wilson, a 16-year-old snare drummer
in Brooklyn United Marching Band.
LeBron
James and St Mary and St Vincent High School Clips 'More Than A Game' HD
scenes from a basketball documentary featuring LeBron James and his
ongoing friendship with the 'Fab 4' or 'Fab 5' in high school. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSy8RPa3amQ 6:05
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1478
June 1, 2016 On this date in 1804, Mikhail Glinka,
Russian composer, was born. On this date in 1925, Hazel Dickens, American singer-songwriter
and guitarist, was born.
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