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Headline↕ | Newspaper↕ | Date↕ | Event↕ | Known For↕ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
MEN WALK ON MOON | The New York Times | July 21, 1969 | Apollo 11 Moon Landing | The biggest headline in history — the Times broke from its famously restrained style to give the story the full front page with a massive photo of Aldrin on the lunar surface, the subhead read 'Astronauts Land on Plain; Collect Rocks, Plant Flag,' capturing humanity's greatest achievement in newspaper form |
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN | Chicago Daily Tribune | November 3, 1948 | 1948 US Presidential Election | The most famous wrong headline ever printed — the Tribune went to press early based on incomplete returns and predicted Dewey would win, Truman held up the paper in a triumphant photo that became one of the most reproduced images in American political history |
TITANIC SINKS FOUR HOURS AFTER HITTING ICEBERG | The New York Times | April 16, 1912 | Sinking of the RMS Titanic | Five-column headline reporting 1,500 dead on the 'unsinkable' luxury liner — early editions were confused about survivor numbers, the Times scooped everyone by getting wireless reports from the rescue ship Carpathia, established the paper's reputation for crisis coverage |
WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG | Variety | October 30, 1929 | 1929 Stock Market Crash | The entertainment trade paper's brilliantly colloquial take on the Black Tuesday crash — show-business slang applied to financial catastrophe, proof that the best headlines use unexpected language, endlessly quoted as the punchiest summary of the crash ever written |
FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD | New York Daily News | October 30, 1975 | NYC Fiscal Crisis — Ford denies bailout | President Ford never actually said those words — the News condensed his refusal to bail out bankrupt New York into five devastating words, the headline arguably cost Ford the 1976 election by alienating New York voters, a masterpiece of tabloid compression |
WAR! | Multiple US papers | December 8, 1941 | Pearl Harbor attack / US enters WWII | One-word headlines screamed across America the morning after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor — some papers used 'WAR!' in type sizes never seen before or since, the San Francisco Chronicle and others cleared everything for the single word, journalism at its most primal |
NIXON RESIGNS | The Washington Post | August 9, 1974 | Richard Nixon's resignation | The Post that broke Watergate got to print the final chapter — the two-word headline in enormous type was the culmination of two years of investigative journalism by Woodward and Bernstein, the moment that proved the press could hold a president accountable |
U.S. ATTACKED | The New York Times | September 12, 2001 | September 11 terrorist attacks | The Times devoted virtually the entire front page to a single massive photograph of the burning towers — the two-word headline in the largest type size the paper had ever used conveyed the shock that rendered the nation speechless, supplemented by six full pages of coverage inside |
GOTCHA! | The Sun (UK) | May 4, 1982 | Sinking of the ARA General Belgrano | The Sun celebrated the torpedoing of an Argentine cruiser during the Falklands War with a one-word exclamation — 323 sailors died, the headline became the most controversial in British tabloid history, later editions changed it to 'DID 1,200 ARGIES DROWN?' which was somehow worse |
FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER | The Sun (UK) | March 13, 1986 | Comedian Freddie Starr alleged prank | The most famous tabloid headline in British history — almost certainly fabricated by publicist Max Clifford, Starr never ate any hamster, but the headline was so perfectly absurd it transcended truth, became the gold standard for outrageous British tabloid invention |
IT'S OVER! | Stars and Stripes | May 8, 1945 | VE Day — Nazi Germany surrenders | The US military newspaper's front page announcing the end of the war in Europe — soldiers across the continent read those two words and wept, danced, and fired celebratory shots, one of the purest expressions of relief and joy ever compressed into a headline |
KING DEAD | Memphis Press-Scimitar | April 4, 1968 | Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. | Two words in the largest type the Memphis paper had ever used — King was shot on a motel balcony in their city, the starkness of the headline matched the brutality of the event, riots erupted in over 100 American cities within hours of the evening editions hitting streets |
STICKS NIX HICK PIX | Variety | July 17, 1935 | Rural audiences rejecting farm-themed movies | The most famous headline in Variety's history and possibly the cleverest headline ever written — five monosyllabic rhyming words that perfectly captured Hollywood's discovery that country audiences didn't want to watch movies about country life, pure headline poetry |
THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF HIS LIFE | Chicago Sun-Times | January 21, 2009 | Barack Obama's inauguration | The Sun-Times covered Obama's inauguration as the hometown paper of America's first Black president — the headline over a soaring photograph captured both the historic weight and optimistic promise of the moment, front pages from that day are among the most collected in modern history |
CRISIS IN THE KREMLIN: GORBACHEV IS OUSTED | The New York Times | August 20, 1991 | 1991 Soviet coup attempt | The front page announcing the attempted coup against Gorbachev that would accidentally trigger the collapse of the Soviet Union — the headline was technically wrong since the coup failed within three days, but the crisis it reported was real, and the USSR dissolved four months later |
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