Two stories under one headline
One of NPR's most popular podcasts is Up First, which takes three stories from Morning Edition and packages them into a 12-to-14-minute daily product. From that podcast, NPR creates a daily newsletter that condenses a couple of stories and other items into a bite-sized news summary.
As a curated news product, Up First matches the thoughtfulness of NPR's flagship morning show with a busy consumer's need to digest stories quickly.
The nature of a digest product means that serious stories about wars and suffering are often adjacent to lighter fare. And writing a single headline for multiple stories is tricky. Headlines are meant to do two things: First, they convey what's in the text that follows. Second, they entice the reader to actually read what follows.
Today, we address a note from an NPR reader who was taken aback by one such headline.
Another audience member wrote that sometimes NPR hosts and guests speak too fast for listeners to comprehend. That made us wonder if there
