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Lately our office has taken to playing a little game we call “News or Spam?”
Here’s the way it works: We each take about five minutes in the morning to scroll through our miles of junk email and then surf around various news websites looking for attention-grabbing headlines.
Then we each take turns calling out one spam title and one news headline title, and everyone has to guess “News or Spam”?
So you could read out, “If You’re Ordering Pizza Today, Beware!” and let each person in the office guess if that is a spam title or a real headline. Can you tell? Here’s the answer.
If you work in a really enterprising office you might want to keep score or start a betting pool. If you work for a government agency you probably have the time and funds to form a league and start wearing team shirts with your name embroidered on them.
Obviously some news sites are better than others when it comes to using headlines. We mostly use cnn.com, Msnbc.com and USAToday.com because they usually carry the most important stories of the day, like what happened on all the reality TV shows last night.
By the same token, some online publications simply don’t lend themselves to this game. I would not, for example, try to fool anyone with a headline from the Wall Street Journal (though the Journal of the American Medical Association does sometimes work surprisingly well). So, to recap:
Bad Headline: “Trade Gap Widens Between China and Indonesian Economic Forces”
Good Headline: “Britney Nude Photos Make Chimpanzees Happy”
It’s fun.
It’s best played on company time.
And, yes, you’re getting paid for it…
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