The headline is a window into a story.
It's also one of newspapering's most interesting (and fun) challenges. How do you convey the nuance of a story in just a few words? How do you alert people that an Anthropologie store is moving into Schaumburg, all in a one-column hed (which is newspaper jargon for "head," which is short for "headline")?
We have a bunch of award-winning headline writers on staff who constantly amaze me. But sometimes even they get stumped.
Neil Holdway, who heads up our night copy desk operation, wrote me an overnight note about a particular challenge: "So we struggled with my panel headline on the Illinois vaccination rate, where I said '1 in 12 Illinoisans have their first dose.' Looks OK at first, but really, should it be "1 in 12 has ...'? And then you have 'their' to deal with."