(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)
David Markowitz, Michigan State University; Hillary Shulman, The Ohio State University, and Todd Rogers, Harvard Kennedy School
(THE CONVERSATION) In an era when people trust news less than ever, how can journalists break through and attract the attention of average people to provide information about their communities, the nation and the world?
By not complicating things.
Our research, published in Science Advances, shows that simple headlines significantly increase article engagement and clicks compared with headlines that use complex language.
In our research, typical news readers preferred simple headlines over complex ones. But importantly, we found that those who actually write headlines – journalists themselves – did not.
We first used data from The Washington Post and Upworthy to see how language features, such as word length and how common a word is, changed how many people clicked on an article’s headline. These datasets included over 31,000 randomized experiments – also known as A/B tests – that compared...
