Unclear Headline and Lead

Screengrab from Inquirer.net

JEERS TO the Philippine Daily Inquirer for publishing on June 20 a contributed report in the business section. Given the headline and lead, the reader could hardly make out what the article was all about. Reading on, the report yields a clue only in the third paragraph. The subject, one guessed, was the attempt by a business group to generate   urban planning ideas to address Metro Manila’s traffic problems.

The headline of the report read: “Hack the CBD brings out ways to end traffic woes.” It reported on the recently concluded “Hack the CBD: The Pitch Battle for Urban Mobility Solutions.” The contest was organized by the Urban Land Institute Philippines, Inquirer Mobile and the Transnational Diversified Group to draw out traffic solutions based on technology.

“Hack the CBD” was part of the headline without setting it off in quotes or in any other way to indicate that this was the name of the contest. But the poorly written article took time to get to the point of the story, and only the most patient reader would have plodded through to try and figure out the point of the story.

The business pages of most newspapers are notorious not only for publishing the press releases of various business interests, but also for articles that make free use of technical and other jargon that keep most readers  in the dark. They forget that news reports are supposed to make sense of otherwise incomprehensible issues and events through narratives that immediately answer the five Ws ( who, what, when, where and why) and H ( how) questions, or which contain the gist of a story as summed up in what is known in journalism as the “nut graph.”

If the point of the story was to celebrate the success of an innovation or experiment, then surely it has failed. A little editing could have made a lot of difference.