5.2: Headlines: In a Nutshell The line editor (who could be a desk editor or copy editor) writes the headline for the article; usually there's room for about six words that need to reflect the article accurately and attract readers. An inexperienced editor who has trouble writing a headline might be tempted to try to write a headline on a secondary angle of the article, but a good headline is based on the lead.
Headlines are written in the historical present tense. That means they written are in present tense but describe events that just happened. The exception to that is when you're reporting on something that happened quite some time ago. If information just became available on attendance figures for the last school year for example, the headline might say, "Attendance Improved Last Year." Usually you're getting dated information because a report was just released, so you can make the article sound more newsy, and get needed attribution in the headline, by using the present tense for the attribution: "Attendance Improved Last Year, Report Says." If something needs to be attributed in the lead, it should also be attributed in the headline.
There are some shortcuts that most newspapers allow in headlines (but few of these shortcuts are seen in The New York Times). To save space, most papers let editors drop forms of the verb "to be" and the articles "a" "an" and "the." The headline writer can also let a comma substitute for "and." What the headline writer should try to avoid - and online papers seem to be big offenders here - is to let one thought in a headline break from one line to the next. That is called a bad break, or wraparound. To avoid bad breaks, keep adjectives and their nouns, and keep verbs and their auxiliary verbs and adverbs, on the same line. Don't let prepositional phrases start on one line and finish on the next. Bad breaks make headlines hard to read, and editors of online papers need to make their publications as reader-friendly as possible.
While the readers of print papers may skim the news, online readers may zoom by at warp speed. So headlines should be as lively as possible, and that means vivid, active verbs. Feature articles always present a challenge because the headline writer wants an intriguing headline that does not steal the best lines from the article. Some of the tools of poetry - alliteration, meter, allusion, metaphor - can be used to create the best feature headlines. 
