Optimisation of Online Newspaper Headline Length with Characters

Abstract

The question of how many characters should an online newspaper headline have is still debatable. This study therefore, sought to examine the optimal length for the online newspaper headlines by using characters as the factor for online news readership. In an attempt to establish an optimal headline length, a sample of 259 out of 730 headlines published by the Tanzanian newspapers of Mwananchi and The Citizen from July 2017 to June 2018 was collected. The study employed Coschedule to obtain the number of characters for each online newspaper headlines. The data were quantitatively analysed with SPSS version 20. The study observed that 72.2 % of 259 headlines that Mwananchi and The Citizen digital journalists designed were short ranging from 16 to 45 characters long on the average. The study accepted the null hypothesis that there was no significant statistical difference in readership between short and long online newspaper headlines. This finding was against the long-standing print newspaper assumption that newspaper readers prefer short headlines to the long ones. The study recommends other studies on the same topic to have a comparative study on headline readership across search engines, social platforms and languages.