There’s been no shortage of political sex scandals, but when one-time Liberal leader Billy Snedden’s extracurricular activity came to light when he died in a Sydney motel in 1987, the now-defunct scandal rag The Truth immortalised the moment with “Snedden died on the job”.Closer to home, we had The Daily Telegraph’s “Bundle of Joyce” – an “exposé of Barnaby Joyce’s affair and pregnancy with a staffer”, as the Walkleys described it when awarding the story the Scoop of the Year award in 2018.Words aside, the way it fit on the page is key to its genius. A personal favourite is “Foot heads arms body” – about a chap surnamed Foot who got a gig with a nuclear disarmament committee – from The Times in the 1980s.Apparently back then, people in rural areas didn’t like movies about people in rural areas. Going way back to 1935, entertainment newspaper Variety splashed with “Sticks nix hick pix”.Try it to the tune of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Everyone remembers The Sun’s singsong soccer stunner from 2000: “Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious”, though the inspiration for that came from a similar effort in the Liverpool Echo three decades earlier.The New York Post’s evergreen and self-explanatory: “Headless body in topless bar” from 1983.So please join for a Walkley down memory lane for a look at some of the best: Of course, news of the category’s axing prompted a bout of reminiscing about the classic headlines of yore. Our colleague Duska Sulicich snared a headline Walkley last year with “Michael rolled, the vote assured, Hallelujah!” – about former Nationals leader Michael McCormack losing his job to Barnaby Joyce – among the winning gems. You can feel the joy as they work their magic online or on the page. These days, I find myself at The Age, surrounded by excellent headline writers. It’s still the first thing most people will see and the competition for eyeballs is fierce. Meanwhile, online, particularly on social media, there are whole new ways to reel in a reader, requiring vastly different skills. It’s still the most fun thing about working in newspapers: the back and forth over ideas, the sense of satisfaction when you nail the perfect combo. The art of squeezing just the right words into some awkward space on a printed page continues daily. Still, Walkleys or not, the headline business in Australia is going strong.
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