Winning Headlines
	Sept. 7, 2001 One Microsoft, indivisible Sept. 12, 2001 OUTRAGE Thousands dead, a nation staggered As terrorists strike New York, Washington Aug. 22, 2001 McScam: 8 busted in prize fraud June 20, 2001 Gates puts money where his mouse is June 19, 2001 Calling all teens: into the labor pool! March 7, 2001 The kid was a man, with a badge Undercover sting at Harrison High fooled everyone
	Judges' Comments
	"His intelligent headlines entice the reader and provoke thought. His word play is sophisticated and never trite or obvious."

In the highly specialized field of newspaper headline writing, feelings and much information often have to be conveyed through a very few characters of type.

Randolph Murray, night editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is the year’s top headline writer in Cox Newspapers. He was asked, is a tight character count his enemy or his friend?

"Sometimes in big stories it’s really your friend," He said. "It pushes you to boil it all down into one word -- the key phrase, the key emotion.

"With ‘Outrage’ " on Sept. 12, we were all struggling over what we wanted to say, and went through a lot permutations.

"One of the things I try to do, particularly on a big story, is come out with ‘Here’s the headline I’d like to put on, but I’m not likely to be allowed to do so. It’s good to get that out because you may see it turn up sometime during the night...

"Finally as we continued playing around with it, we said what we are trying to do is express outrage, and it clicked. That became the headline."

A Georgia native, Murray began his newspaper career as a copy boy for The Atlanta Constitution. He graduated from Georgia State University with a degree in journalism. At the latter, a tough professor named George Graeff introduced him to the craft of headline writing.

"He was a former copy desk chief for The Constitution," Murray recalled. "He ran his class like the old rim (workplace for copyeditors).

"We would go into class and he would throw stories at us. We had a deadline, just like in a newsroom. If he didn’t like what he wrote he would throw it back at us. In addition, he would put a grade on it. I was fortunate to get one of the few ‘A’s’ he gave."

Murray worked for newspapers in Georgia, Alabama and Florida before serving as night managing editor of the Orlando Sentinel and Chicago Tribune; Washington, D.C. news editor for the latter; and editor of the now-defunct Anchorage Times in Alaska.

What are his favorite headlines?

"I’ve got in too many years to do that," he replied.

"One day in Orlando a woman standing outside a bus stop and holding a basket of Kentucky Fried Chicken had two teenagers drive up, grab her chicken and drive away. A reporter found it in the police reports and wrote a little four-paragraph brief about it. I had to describe it in a 1-24-3. I wrote:

"Finger

lickin’

gone"

Murray is a former Scout leader and Sunday school teacher. Does the latter role make news from Israel’s West Bank hit home harder for him than it might for other journalists?

"Well, maybe," he said. "Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem and its Church of the Nativity...

"For the first time, people of all three religions are caught in a web of violence that violates all those sites. It’s very disturbing."