A Dek is a Subhed in Journalism

A Dek is a Subhed in JournalismA Dek is a Subhed in JournalismA dek is a journalism term for the summary that appears below the headline of a story on a printed page, usually in a smaller font (but in a larger font than the main body of the article). Dek, like other slang terms editors and copy editors use when they are referring to stories they are working on, is a word you might hear spoken or written on a story during the editing process but is seldom seen in a printed sentence. In journalism jargon, the terms subhed or dek may be used interchangeably, but it is also referred to as a subhead, subheading, slug, subtitle or deck. Why Dek Is Spelled Oddly Why the misspelling? The same reason the word lede, referring to an articles opening paragraph (or graf) is spelled wrong Copy editors write such notations directly on printed proofs of nachrichtensendungpaper pages, and by misspelling the terms, make it clear that it was an instruction or reference for the page layout editor or typesetter, not a missing word to be inserted into the copy itself. What Makes a Dek In the early days of newspapers, one article might have several headlines and subheadlines stacked up on each other, in what became known as a deck or dek. Its unusual for an article to have more than one headline and subheadline in modern newspapers since the news hole (the amount of physical space on the page for news copy) has grown smaller. In traditional print publications, it does not matter if the dek is super short, just a phrase, a sentence, a blurb or even a full paragraph, as long as it helps readers get an idea of the story and make a decision about whether they should continue on to read the full article. The dek informs the reader about the topic at hand, and usually complements or further explains the headline. How to Write a Dek Before the news was published online, requiring optimization for keywords and search engines, traditional print publications like newspapers and mag azines useddeks that were fairly substantive. Headlines were catchy and written to entertain while subheads were expected to carry the weight of explaining what the story was actually about. But with search engines such as Google which drive much of the traffic to online news articles, headlines now play a large role in how a dek is written. To ensure that a search engine can pick up and identify articles based on the content in the whole article, its important that the headline itself is both optimized and to the point. No longer are headlines merely entertaining, instead, they get to the point and address what the article is about without relying on the dek to do the explaining. For online publishing, the dek would most likely be placed in the reserved short article summary area of the website or in the meta description box that accompanies the whole article, to briefly sum up what the article is about. To write a well-formed dek or meta description, consider the following steps S ummarize but dont give away the full story.Consider and incorporate SEO, this includes being mindful ofcharacter limits and keyword inclusion.Let the reader know the type of story she is about to see, i.e. an interview, list, review or QA.Leave out any acronyms or abbreviations and avoid puns (search engines arent clever enough).Be brief and to the point.Use verbs and the articles voice or tone.Provide just enough detail and information to get readers to move onto reading the article itself.