Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
The punning headline is on the way out so the pundits tell us.
Internet search engines now used, it seems, by all and sundry, have revived an old fashioned concept: namely that the headline on a newspaper article should tell you what’s in the report — or ‘story’, as we journalists tend to call newspaper reports.
Why? It’s simple. When search engine users trawl through the list of what is available on a particular topic they want to get straight to the point and not have to decipher what lies behind a clever headline.
Now, in my experience, newspaper readers are divided about punning headlines. Some love them; some hate them. According to the former editor of the London Guardian newspaper and now media commentator, Peter Preston, the haters have won. But I can report that the sub-editors who think up those headlines (I have to declare an interest: I love them — the cornier the better) are hitting back.
The ‘tabloidisation’ of newspapers — by which former broadsheet papers transform themselves into tabloid format, has led to a new trend with newspapers these days now full of ‘boxes’ highlighting certain aspects of a story, or adding historical references.
Yet there is still a problem with the non-punning headline that now rules the roost. There was a pearl on the front page of the Financial Times — one that deserves to be preserved for posterity.
It stated, quite simply ‘Buffett to give bulk of fortune to Gates’.
Now, first, it is important to note that it was a capital ‘G’ at the beginning of ‘Gates’. This established that this was not to be a report about the world’s second richest man becoming obsessed by garden gates
No, believe it or not, here was no pun it really was a story about the world’s second richest man planning to give the bulk of his fortune to the world’s richest man.
Eh? What? Philanthropy can take some pretty strange forms, but this sounded ridiculous. Further reading — indeed the first paragraph established that ‘Warren Buffet, the world’s second richest person, said he would give the bulk of his $40bn-plus fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’, the charity established by his even-wealthier friend.
This news came hot on the heels of Gates’s own announcement that he would soon step down from day-to-day running of the origin of his great wealth, namely Microsoft, and concentrate his energies on the charity through which he is trying to raise the standard of education and health, not least in developing countries.
It is a noble cause, and it was interesting last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos to hear Gates’s ally, U2’s Bono, emphasise, in the face of the usual objections that ‘aid tends to be wasted’, that Gates would apply the entrepreneurial acumen that built up his fortune to the distribution of aid.
The figures involved are indeed huge and Buffet hopes the income on his donation will double the annual spending of Gates’s Foundation from $1.4 bn to $2.8 bn. The compilers of those newspaper ‘boxes’ soon got to work and indicated that, although in absolute terms, Bill Gates’s $35bn charitable donation and Buffet’s $31bn dwarfed those famous charitable foundations of Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller, as a percentage of US gross domestic product they are smaller. But later reports indicated that most of Gates’s outstanding fortune of $50bn, will be devoted to the Foundation, over and above the $35 bn, in which case he beats Carnegie and Rockefeller even as a percentage of GDP. It is difficult to keep up with this!
Well, all one can say is good for them. Rockefeller and Carnegie have both been quoted on the subject with Andrew Carnegie famously saying ‘The man who dies rich dies in disgrace’. Gates says simply “We want everyone to have what we had (in education).”
Williams Keegan
