Playing with Words for Fun and Clicks

My name is Dennis, and I'm a word lover.

I love the clever headline, the captivating caption. And I try to offer them here.

The first time I used classic film noir lingo like "heist" and "getaway car" in a news story at the Philadelphia Inquirer I felt I had crossed a magical threshhold to a world where you could get paid and have fun at the same time. I haven't had an honest job since.

My world at the Inky was close to the world depicted in the video, but with fewer eyeshades.

We still had crime beat reporters (chain-smoking scribes with pocket flasks?) out in the precincts who phoned in stories to the newsroom.

Our city desk was a mammoth wooden contraption with metal spikes to file copies of stories, which we typed on multilayered carbon-copy books.

Linotype operators set type with hot lead and the ink-stained printing press guys wore those little folded newsprint hats.

Our product was words.

Fast forward to now. I am the reporter, the editor, the printer and the truck driver who brings you the words.

Words are not all there is on Brentwood Patch, sure, but they endure as the backbone upon which hypertext and images and videos stand.

And to make it even cooler, clever headlines and a riveting opening paragraphs (heds, ledes and grafs in editorial lingo) get more clicks, which means more readers.

I collected a few of my bon mots, heds and tweets from the past week that I think you might enjoy. They still make me giggle, or at least smile. 

In rewriting the lede of a story based on calendar listings for the weekend, I described the subject of an afternoon tour at the Getty as "."

The popularity of my weekly has to be based on more than interest by crime freaks, since we have so little crime here.  

I like to think my writing helps, and it was my use of "" in the lede for this week's report that made me flash back to those "heist" and "getaway" days back in the city room.  (My police blotter inspiration is the Arcata Eye, up north; one can only aspire, not worthy, etc.)

Brentwood Patch is blessed with a well-educated readership, so I'm confident when I write a hed for a photo slideshow like  that you enjoy the play on words and the reference and click through to see the images.

Writing  for Twitter is a new challenge, where the image one projects may be as important as the "content" of one's messages (Marshall McLuhan, anyone?) The 140-character limitation makes crafting tweets an exacting challenge.

My mission: Draw readers to a fresh local tsunami story I had just published.

The challenge: Cut through the Twitter stench of "aggregators" repackaging and hyping stale content to exploit the terrible tragedy in Japan for extra ad clicks.

Venice Patch editor Samantha Page had uploaded  and quoted disappointed surfers who had hoped the tsunami might mean awesome sets.

My tweet:

Tsunami bummer Venice Beach California "Dude, wheres my surf?" http://patch.com/A-fJYH  

Clever, accurately represents the story, includes keywords Venice Beach, California and tsunami  in only 56 characters  (thank you, built-in URL shortener) and is therefore easy to "retweet" with comments.

Out of all the tweets I tweeted for this story, this one got the best response.

And it made me giggle.