Tag Archives: hack

Is the answer to any headline that ends in a question ‘yes’?

No.

newspaper

Via HN, Wikipedia statesĀ Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.

If you think about it, this makes sense. Articles that could be answered by ‘yes’ choose to state the news in the headline rather than asking a fake question.

Or as Wikipedia explains it, “The maxim trends towards being universally true because of a simple principle of headline writing: if a story has enough sources to have a high chance of accuracy, a headline will be assertive”.

This interests me as it’s a news headline hack that tends to work. Find out the answer without having to go past the jump.