Thanks for your comment. I’ve just had a look at the BBC news pages and see what you mean! These seem to me old-school cross-heads. Certainly not to make them searchable and tagged as headings seems a waste of a natural search opportunity in our world — but who am I to quibble with the Beeb?!

These sorts of headings should entice you to read on but it should be easy to find what they refer to — especially online. Sometimes the heading and what it refers are indeed miles apart, which is when enticing could become irritating.

When I worked in magazines it was a strict rule that the nugget came very quickly after the cross-head referring to it, so the newsstand browser could make an instant connection. But you still see some magazines that have a cross-head that refers to something a page or more BACK, which always make me wince…

PS: According to Foam Train’s fascinating typographical glossary at http://www.owlsoup.com/foamtrain/glossary/aaa.html a title or subhead centered over the text” and what we are talking about are more strictly “sideheads”. Not a term I’ve heard — maybe it’s a US/UK thing (like subdeck/standfirst etc).

All good advice.
In terms of headings rather than headlines, one thing I find really annoying on the BBC news site, is their habit of placing a heading two or three paragraphs above the text it refers to. In actual fact its not a heading. It uses bold tags rather than heading tags. So that’s bad form too.
I concede it often makes me keep reading, but at the same time infuriates me because I have to hunt for the interesting nugget that was promised by the heading.
What do you think about this? I’ve not noticed it anywhere else.

James