Headlines: 'Brown book breaks record in hours'

The ninth headline down in this BBC News 'Most Popular Stories Now' widget caused me some confusion:

BBC News widget including ambiguous headline
What was this brown book, and why was it breaking records?

After a moment's thought, I came to the conclusion that it must be a book about (or possibly by) prime minister Gordon Brown.

Obviously, I was wrong: the book in question was Dan Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol. The cover does look fairly brown, though.

If the BBC cares about SEO, it really should include the title (or at least the name of the author) in the headline of an article about a book.


BBC News: Brown book breaks record in hours

2 comments:

Blue said...

The least they could've done was toss in an 's so you know 'Brown' is a surname and not referring to the colour.

JD (The Engine Room) said...

Yes, definitely.

Although I suppose the story was still the 9th most popular on the BBC News site, so it's not as if the headline stopped people finding it...