Courtesy: Soumyadipto Banerjee's Facebook Page
"I refuse to believe that every Page One editor in every leading newspaper thought of the same exact headline. My guess is: This headline has been plagiarised from a tweet or a Facebook post."- Soumyadipto Banerjee
Sudip Ghosh came on Soumyadipto's stream and asked- Btw, most newspaper headlines in english and (in my case) Bengali had been inspired by FB or Tweeter slogans from the previous night. Simple and understandable, since that's the trend. If we can collect leads from fb updates, make news from twitter status, why not plagiarise news headings from the same sources on a given day? I see nothing wrong in this. After all, social media is the future of media, right ?
Sarah Salvadore in the same stream says- I agree Sudipda, But the problem with this is the next day's edition ends up looking like a copy paste job. There is definitely no dearth of witty and smart people online. But whatever happened to exercising your grey cells in the newsroom? I mean we can quote people from social media, not sure I feel comfortable using their lines as headline. Also, I wonder what the ethics are regarding attribution?
Neha Ved adds in the stream that the headline could have been inspired by Amul’s advertisement.
The discussion gets more vibrant and inquisitive when Ankur Pathak wonders- Even if the HL is plagiarised/inspired by a tweet/FB post, the point is the editors still decided to carry it same day, same edition right? The source material then becomes irrespective. It is baffling enough to know that they decided to go with this one and not anything else.
Soumyapta Banerjee continues- Yes Ankur Pathak. The headline is not even good. Times of India gave such a great headline when Abhinav Bindra won gold in the last Olympics. Sad to say newspapers are becoming a pale shadow of their earlier selves.Nothing wrong in picking up from social media but the result is what you see above. Gone are the days when I used to see my editors like Dipayan Chatterjee, Abhijit Dasgupta or R Rajagopal break their heads for a headline with alliteration. Those days editors searched in their heads, now the editors obviously log onto Twitter and Facbook for inspiration and it results into badly copied Hindi film titles. Nothing wrong in what is happening today, the difference is in the quality and herd mentality.
Mahul Brahma comments that it’s not just the English newspapers but Ganashakti, a reputed Bangla newspaper, that had also carried the same headline.
There were many LOLs (Laugh out Louds) and Hahahas in the stream! The virtual discussion was of course on Newspapers as big as Times Of India and Hindustan Times.
Dhiman Chattopadhyay on the same stream yet again finds the matching headlines weird. He wonders if the "headline writers are becoming lazier by the day – another side effect of crowd sourcing everything from story ideas to headlines from social media?"
Dale Bhagwagar, a PR agent comments- Arre yaar…. why is everyone thinking ulta. Might be a news agency report. Reporters/subs might have picked up the headline from an agency report and made it their own, adding individual inputs and bylines to the story (without realising that other papers might do the same.) Hota hai yaar. Any scribe/sub-ed would understand what I am talking about.
Yeh cheez aap logon ke dimaag mein kyun nahin aayee?
Soumyadipto Banerjee ends his Facebook stream with -News agencies (Reuters, PTI, UNI etc) have direct headlines that sound more like alerts. They won't suggest headlines like this.
I am not talking about their websites. I am talking about their news-feeds to leading media houses.
In any case, no news agency has suggested this headline.Also, if you are the page one editor dealing with the front page of a national newspaper and your headline is picked up from another web-site, you surely don't deserve the job.