Headlines in British and German online newspapers

Dynamic development of online press has been accompanied by various transformations in journalistic genres and news discourse. The following study focuses on headlines in online newspapers. The aim of the analysis was to investigate whether the online headlines conform to the conventions traditionally associated with the shape of the newspaper headlines. The analysis covered headlines of news stories from selected British and German online newspapers, both hard and soft news headlines. The study involved the examination of the discourse, syntactic and lexical properties of the titles. The analysis investigated as well the relation between the homepage headline and the story headline in online newspapers. The analysis showed that online headlines follow selected conventions of traditional print headlines, but that they have also developed features of their own. The article discusses certain differences between the newspapers covered in the analysis as well