Manning Pynn is worried about headline size. In his Sunday column, the Orlando Sentinel's ombudsman thinks the newspaper is not sending a consistent message with its headline size.

Lately lead headlines have become a not-always-reliable gauge of the relative importance of day-to-day events.

When the first of three hurricanes swept through Central Florida last August, the lead headline hollered, appropriately, in two lines of large, capital letters: CHARLEY RIPS ACROSS FLORIDA.

When last November's presidential election still wasn't decided the next day, the lead headline announced in a single line of even larger capital letters: STILL COUNTING.

The next day, after the world learned that George W. Bush had been re-elected, the lead headline stated in a single line of capital letters -- about half the size as those the day before: BUSH CALLS FOR UNITY.

Then, when Bush gave his inauguration speech, the lead headline bellowed in near-Hurricane Charley-size, capital letters: U.S. MUST SPREAD FREEDOM, BUSH SAYS.

That prompted one reader to ask if the event had warranted "the 'Second-coming' headline on today's front page?"

I hardly think so.

Although the inauguration speech contained a somewhat unanticipated pronouncement, it certainly wasn't of greater importance than the tsunamis that struck South Asia three weeks before, a disaster of biblical proportions. Yet none of the Sentinel's tsunami headlines approached the size of the one on the inauguration package -- even as the death toll climbed into the scores of thousands.

Sure, you could argue the play on the tsunami first day could have been bigger. Sentinel AME/Visuals Bonita Burton, who was on vacation, tells me that if she'd been in the newsroom "you bet we'd have gone bigger. MUCH bigger in how we played that." But even so, this story was a creeping horror. It was obviously big, but we didn't know how big. There wasn't a big "Holy Crap" moment to explode the story into 150 point type.

If you're going to collect a bunch of newspapers and get out your pica pole to measure the headlines, you'll surely find all sorts of inconsistencies. But (and this may surprise you) real people don't do that. They look (we hope) at the totality of coverage. The tsunami was on the front page (and multiple inside pages) in most major newspapers for at least a week. The inauguration was two days, tops, and then gone. You simply cannot look at the coverage given to those stories and conclude that editors thought that the inauguration was more important. Headlines are not the only clues we give, and they're not the only clues readers look for.

Newspaper front pages are dynamic creatures. They change in small ways from day to day (a busy news day can mean a story that would normally make A1 gets shunted back to Metro) and in larger ways from year to year. Burton bridles at the argument that "somehow readers save their hurricane papers from six months ago, or from the redesign five years ago, and are keeping score to be sure we don't overplay the day's news. By that measure, we not only underplayed the Tsunami, but also the space shuttle explosion, Hurricane Andrew, JFK's death, man landing on the moon, the Titanic sinking ..." (I have a JFK front page that, among assassination stories, has a story about a sawmill fire and the Treasury Department asking Congress to authorize the minting of silver dollars. That wouldn't happen today.)

Besides, the inauguration of a president is a historic moment, and people (we hope) look to newspapers to mark such things and to put them in perspective. Burton, while allowing that the inauguration page probably wouldn't have lost much impact with a smaller or one-line headline, says:

To me, this day's headline felt proportional for a poster front and issue that carried nothing but Inaugural news on 1A and through most of the A-section. It was a different news product, and needed to reflect that. Charlotte asked us to deliver a paper that was bold and elegant, and I felt that's what we did. We deliberately resisted the six-column photo op in favor of the more emotional image from the Constitution Ball. And we worked closely with editors to write an appropriate headline.

Burton also disagrees that all-caps headlines are inherently "loud."

Just because something appears in all capital letters, it is equated with screaming and hollering. We use all caps occasionally to identify stories that need a different voice than a typical news story. You can whisper in uppercase as well as shout. We've used all caps on stories about a little girl who underwent a delicate brain operation, manatees coming home for the winter, "Desperate Housewives" being a hit on TV, Johnny Carson dying, etc. What the headline says matters as much or more than how you say it. Clearly, we raised our voice on Inauguration Day, but only because we also raised the tenor of our coverage.

Sentinel editor Charlotte Hall told Pynn, in a point he never really addresses, "Any paper is a work in progress, and the best papers are always changing and trying new ideas." To Burton, that "says a lot about the kind of energy that is just starting to take root here. I don't think she would have recruited an AME out of the Mercury News if she didn't want to see our visual identity evolve into one that communicates with more conviction. In the end, that's all we're going for out here."

Pynn ends his column with this:

Newspapers are full of subtle symbols, many of them, unfortunately, too subtle. Headline size is too useful a measure of relative importance to be overlooked in the effort to design attractive pages.

Of course headline size is useful and important. Obviously we'd degrade its usefulness if we started giving stories about lost puppies 96 point headlines. But I don't see that happening. And complaining about the relatively slight differences of scale in the headlines of two undeniably major stories seems to me to be just so much pointless hair-splitting.

>In headlines, SIZE DOES MATTER [Orlando Sentinel]