NEWSPAPERS have always relied on headlines and billboards outside newsagents or paper sellers to catch the eye of the public.
They work on the principal of using key words from the story in a reduced form.
The reasoning behind billboards is to make you buy the newspaper in the first place and the headline is there to make you want to read the story.
Many of us have be
en writing them through the years on posters advertising events – sometimes it works but other times it does not.
I was once on holiday in Yorkshire when I saw the following newspaper bill outside a newsagent: "Hundred dead in NE pit disaster".
I should explain it was at a time when pits were still numerous in the North East of England. I bought the newspaper, as did many others, and I scanned it.
I thought at first it was unusual that it was not the lead story and turned inside and could not find the story at the top of a page either.
After scanning the newspaper intently, I found it – one paragraph hidden at the bottom of a page.
It stated: "One hundred miners are trapped, feared dead, in a pit disaster in north east Mozambique."
I learnt one or two things that day. The first was never to take at face value what newspaper billboards said and secondly how a good notice can make the public buy a newspaper.
This anecdote came flooding back last week on buying Thursday's Gazette and reading a front page headline. It stated quite honestly: "Tory crusade to reduce rate rise."
Great, I thought, at last a political party looking after the general public as many face ever-increasing council tax bills along with a diminishing income and increasing expenditure month by month.
But again I was disappointed – the crusade to reduce the rate rise only encompassed hard-hit Northumberland businesses.
It was being taken up by Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Berwick, who had been approached by a number of small businesses in Northumberland.
But it was here that my sympathy ended for this particular crusade.
Why not campaign for all hard-pressed ratepayers? Why just the small business interest? Everyone is finding it hard going so she would have gathered much more support if she had done it on behalf of all council taxpayers.
But I am afraid she is a lone voice blowing against the wind as far as this crusade is concerned. The council is already cash-strapped through being forced into a unitary authority, which no one wanted apart from those in Government, bad investments and many other reasons as the credit crunch remains with us.
