Reporters used to be able to tell someone who complained about a headline in The Day, "I don't write the headlines."  

As a longtime staff writer, I confess it was a relief to be able to "blame" an editor for a headline a reader found offensive.  

Today, it's no longer true that only editors write headlines, especially when it comes to breaking news stories and articles we post online during the day. Reporters put a suggested headline on their stories, and if it's appropriate, whoever edits and posts the story often leaves it there.

Don't worry. The craft of professional headline-writing is alive and well.

We have a copy desk staff with award-winning headline writers, but they come in later in the day to put the paper together for print and finalize stories for the web. In many cases, they don't see a story until it's been posted online for hours with the suggested headline.

Copy Desk Chief John Ruddy has been crafting headlines for The Day since the 1990s and regularly winning awards for them. He teaches the art to future headline-writers in his copy editing course at UConn.

"My goal is to summarize the content and tone of the story as accurately as possible, to be funny when I can and to avoid being funny when it's not appropriate," he told me this week. 

"Nobody starts off writing good headlines," Ruddy said. "It's a skill and an art, and like anything else it takes practice. I'm pretty good at it now just through sheer repetition. It's hard to do it and capture the nuances and be doing that five minutes before deadline, but that's part of it."

As we prepared for our coverage of the upcoming September 11 anniversary, we looked back at the front page we published on September 12, 2001, as the nation reeled from the terror attacks. The copy desk wrote the simple and terrifyingly effective headline that ran in huge, bold, capitalized type over a photo of a fireball erupting from south tower of the World Trade Center: ACTS OF WAR. Beneath it, the drophead read, ATTACKS ON WORLD TRADE CENTER, PENTAGON STUN WORLD; DEATHS EXPECTED TO BE IN THE THOUSANDS.

"I think it weathered pretty well," Ruddy said, noting that other papers used the same headline. "Given what we knew at the time, we certainly didn't overplay it. There was no way to overplay it. A war followed, almost immediately. It had the appropriate tone. Not everybody's headline the next day hit the mark."

This past Tuesday, Ruddy rewrote the headline on an Associated Press wire story about the last U.S. troops leaving Afghanistan.

"I felt that was one for the history books and wrote, 'America's longest war is over,'" Ruddy said.

Writing headlines for the web is easier than crafting print headlines, because the writer is not restricted by space. In the paper, the headline can only be as long as space allows and only as clever as time allows. Headline writing is often a group effort on the copy desk as the editors scramble to put the pages together on deadline.

"The later it gets, the more time restriction becomes a factor," said Ruddy. "When I'm writing for print, I'm concentrating on what fits, but I'm also thinking about what's going to look good typographically, what's going to be best for the page, and what's going to be best for the local audience."

Our print edition is read mostly by a local audience, while our web stories go far and wide.

Some other headline nuggets Ruddy shared with me:

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[naviga:li]We try to write online headlines that people will be able to find through a search engine. That's called search engine optimization, but "If people think our headlines are clickbait, we're not trying to do that."[/naviga:li]

[naviga:li]Longtime readers come to understand the rules of headline writing without ever having been taught them. Rather than use the precious space to attribute a quote to somebody, we often use a colon (Biden:) to indicate that someone is speaking. Rather than saying 'Biden and Harris,' we say, 'Biden, Harris,' and readers know what we mean.[/naviga:li]

[naviga:li]Copy editors are grateful we haven't had a president with a long name, such as Eisenhower, in a long time, Ruddy joked. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden are all easier to fit on the page.[/naviga:li]

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Hope you enjoyed reading about headlines this week, and that you read beyond them, too, when you pick up The Day.

Karen Florin is The Day's engagement editor. She can be reached at k.florin@theday.com or (860) 701-4217.