When your message has to capture and hold your reader’s attention, two of the most important tools at your disposal are the strong lede and the attention-grabbing headline.
But to work, they have to tell the same story.
Consider the following powerful lede in a press release from the Yale School of Medicine:
“Eliminating cancer stem cells (CSCs) within a tumor could hold the key to successful treatments for ovarian cancer, which has been notoriously difficult to detect and treat.”
The headline for this release on the Yale University Office of Public Affairs website reads: “Disarming Specialized Stem Cells Might Combat Deadly Ovarian Cancer.”
But over on Futurity, a science press-release aggregator, the same story leads with this headline: “Stem cells linked to deadly ovarian cancer.”
Whoops.
Futurity editors, you can probably expect to be getting a call from the Yale OPA pretty soon . . .
