The Caption Kicker
This is it: the first words on the page the readers read
Style with guile
Once upon a time in Johannesburg, I was trained in British tabloid-style newspaper production by a bright young team fresh with all the latest ideas from London. This was back in the days when newspapers were still printed on paper.
The UK tabloids, we were told, had specialist subeditors who only wrote headlines, or subheadings, or pull quotes (very important), or picture captions (even more important).
However, still more vital than the caption writers were the caption kicker writers, a very specialized breed indeed.
The kicker is those few words in bold before the main caption. TIME loves kickers. I have a copy here from 7 October 2013, cover story “Japan Rising”. Here are some examples:
Pandamonium Fourteen giant-panda cubs rest in a crib… [definitely the cutest picture as well as the best kicker in the magazine]
Savvy speech Ted Cruz’s 21-hour talkathon…
Top gun Japanese pilot Kohta “Vader” Araki…
Ready to roll An F-15 fighter jet…
Game changer Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe… [RIP]
You get the picture, I hope. Literally.
Why is the caption kicker so important?
In this visual era, the very first thing the reader looks at on the page is the main picture. This includes the glossy advertising images, so you are always competing with them. Don’t for a moment think that readers even glance at the headlines first. No. They look at the picture, and then if the picture interests them … they look at the caption.
This is why the caption kicker is so important. This is where you first hook the viewer into actually reading something on your page. Attention is all.
Bloodstained typing fingers
British tabloid journalism is absolutely shamelessly manipulative. I’m not going to give any recent examples, the Ukraine war situation is just too provocative. But they really know how to play the game, how to provoke emotions, how to sensationalize and twist and fetishize the most trivial detail.
There will be a further newsroom team designing the overall page for maximum impact, tweaking and harmonizing every element so that there are no repetitions or clashes, and with bullet points, graphics and shout-outs summarizing the important points.
From all of this, you can immediately understand the importance of having the most attention-grabbing pictures that money can buy, splashed as big and bright as typography will allow.
Prince Harry recently became the first ranking royalty in over a century to testify in court, over his claims of harassment and intrusion by the British press:
“How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness?” Harry said, adding that “some of the editors and journalists... are responsible for causing a lot of pain, upset, and in some cases, speaking personally, death.”
So the ghost of Princess Diana fleeing the paparazzi still haunts Fleet Street, even if the press gangs have all moved on to Canary Wharf. There’s always a new face to pursue.
[Side note: I studied at King’s College in London over 1978/79. If you turned right at the college gate, Fleet Street began, back in the days when Fleet Street was still Fleet Street. On the final day of lectures, our class went on a pub crawl, stopping for a drink at every tavern in Fleet Street. I was seriously ill long before I reached the end of the road. You cannot believe how the English drink, especially students and journalists.]
Find new cliches
My first copy editing job in 1999 was on the entertainment section of a national daily. No one struts their stuff in the arts pages, I was told. There are no songbirds here. Find some new cliches.
I took these instructions seriously. I can remember only one of the thousands of caption kickers that I wrote over the years and it dates from this early assignment. The fact that it was the longest caption kicker I ever wrote helped jog my memory.
However: it is a good example of how much you can actually do with a kicker, if you’re really determined to kick.
First of all, it should be understood that there was a truly weird spectre haunting South Africa at the time, this being HIV-Aids. The nation had a new president, Thabo Mbeki, who was in deep denial about the very existence of the illness. Especially in the media, an agonized debate was going on about how to tackle this issue.
So the one place where you could get away from all of this gloom and doom was the arts and entertainment section. Here I edited a review of what was billed as a light musical comedy, in which people apparently keep bursting into song about how good they feel. And then, it turns out, they further reveal in their cheerful lyrics that they’re all actually HIV-positive. Back in the day when such “positive” information was widely being understood as being a death sentence.
Now, I feel that a good review of a show should give readers a fair idea of what to expect, without too many spoilers. People pay good money for live entertainment, they’re entitled to know if there’s a major theme to what they’re going to watch.
So my exact kicker was: By the way, I’m HIV-positive, tra la. The name of the musical (which gave no hint as to the content) thankfully escapes me now.
I checked with my editor and she liked it, so it got printed. Anyone genuinely interested in a show about Aids was duly informed as to the subtext. No one up for a night of light entertainment who found themselves trapped in a morality play could say, “Why didn’t someone warn me?”
Where headlines come from
One other fact stuck in my head from this crash course in newspaper design. Three quarters of what the average reader remembers of a story is simply the headline. Caption kickers are not meant to be remembered, they are actually carefully designed to be skimmed over. Kickers are orientation markers, designed to draw your eye into reading the full caption and ultimately into reading the story itself.
The following is a true story. You may take it as proof of the naivete of the writer. When I was young, there were two things that really puzzled me about newspapers. One was that no matter how long or short the story was, it exactly fitted the box on the page.
The other was that a headline magically appeared at the top of each story.
So I asked my mother: “Where do headlines come from?”
She laughed, and said, there are people who write them.
Somehow, I imagined that headlines magically wrote themselves.
Decades later, I would find myself staring deep into the headline box on my screen and moving my fingers (you have to be able to touch-type to carry this off properly). Eventually, if I moved my fingers enough, I found that something would appear in that box that fitted and made sense.
And I realized that I was right after all. Headlines really do write themselves. The human on the desk is just a channel to that primal soup of narrative hooks, atrocious puns and well-worn phrases from which headlines emerge. I know that many of the most lucrative clickbait headlines are generated by algorithms, but the true magic of a great headline will never be captured by a machine.
A story for another day.
Well done
I will end with a story from the Kingdom of Eswatini. We have a housekeeper who comes once a week. She lives in a nearby settlement, where her gardener husband is a community policeman. He’s a tremendous star, he recently caught a crook who twice stole the power line to our house, he’d been hitting the whole area.
One day, I came across a picture of our hero in the newspaper getting a certificate, he’d been on a training course. It’s not every day you get your picture in the main national daily.
I asked our housekeeper if she’d seen this picture, she said no, and I said here, take it, show your husband he’s in the news. She picked up the paper, beamed, and said “Well done!”
So you see. When a caption kicker scores, it can be the most memorable thing in the whole newspaper.