Headlines matter, maybe

As a journalist, I wrote my first newspaper headline in 1961 and my last in 2008. I mention this because I have come to think that the headlines on blog-posts make a huge difference. That is the only way I can explain the heavy readership during the last month of the new most popular post at our-war.com.

The headline is "Urgent! Telegram from Gettysburg." It is an old post. The only way I can explain its surge since June is that the words "Urgent!" and "Gettysburg" attract readers.

But maybe I'm wrong about the importance of headlines. Another recent riser is "Exeter's Civil War General." This is a "label head," as journalists would say. Newspapers discourage label heads -- or at least I always did as an editor -- because they lack the pizzazz of headlines with verbs (e.g., FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD).

Here are the top ten posts as of mid-August. The numbers in brackets indicate where these posts stood a month ago. Those in parentheses indicate how many months the posts have been in the top ten. FYI, readership for these posts ranks from 140 to 350.

1. Urgent! Telegram from Gettysburg [2] (3)

2. Farewell, my teacher [1] (3)

3. Exeter’s Civil War general [9] (2)

4. Did Abraham Lincoln really free the slaves? [3] (3) 

5. Faces of Fort Wagner, Olustee and Andersonville [4] (5)

6. The Civil War: ‘It was not my fault,’ Buchanan insists [6] (3)

7. Harnessing the power of the telling detail [new to list]

8. My friend Chester [5] (6)

9. Gallery: Faces of the Fighting Fifth (part one) [7] (5)

10. History’s touch [10] (4)

And the next five . . .

11. How did Lincoln Republicans morph into Obama Democrats?

12. The soldier’s story behind the love story, Part II

13. Kennedy gave FDR too much credit, shortchanged Ike

14. Emails from afar and a happy coincidence

15. The soldier’s story behind the love story, Part I

Also popular during the last month:

1. The day they died like white men

2. Stand your ground, circa 1864

3. Rebel duds, rebel territory: Sgt. Thurston’s great escape