Two Banner Headlines, but Only One Page 1

Times Insider shares historic insights from The New York Times. In this piece, David W. Dunlap, a Metro reporter, looks back at The Times’s use of a “paddle wheel” headline.

No question about it: The Supreme Court deadlock that effectively blocked President Obama’s plan to shield as many as five million undocumented immigrants from deportation merited a banner headline in The New York Times.

No question about it: The decision by British voters to quit the European Union merited a banner headline in The New York Times.

Unfortunately, they happened on the same day.

So Thursday night, editors in The Times’s newsroom resorted to a rarely-used design device known as a paddle wheel headline.

The front page of the first edition of the newspaper carried a single-line banner: “Split Court Stifles Obama on Immigration.” But once the momentous development in Europe was known, the immigration story took second billing to: “British Stun World With Vote to Leave E.U.”

(Had the British voted to remain in the union, the plan was to place the story at the bottom of the page, “because preserving the status quo wouldn’t have been as dramatic,” Tom Jolly, an associate masthead editor, said.)

For some sense of precedent, Mr. Jolly turned to The Times of July 26, 2000, carrying news that President Bill Clinton was giving up on peace negotiations with Israeli and Palestinian leaders even as Gov. George W. Bush of Texas was announcing that his vice-presidential running mate would be Dick Cheney.

“Clinton Ends Deadlocked Peace Talks,” the top headline said in all uppercase letters. “Bush Names Cheney, Citing ‘Integrity’ and ‘Experience,’ ” was rendered in uppercase and lowercase.

“Incredibly, there was a third story that day that we played as the photo, centered under the paddle wheel: the crash of the Concorde, which on most other days would have been the lead headline itself,” Mr. Jolly recalled.

“Paddle wheel” seems to be an especially descriptive bit of newsroom jargon, since paddles are equal in size and importance, though one always appears to be above another as the wheel turns.

But the origin of the term is much more abstruse.

Tom Bodkin, the creative director of The Times, recalled (not from personal experience, it should be said) that on Aug. 8, 1959, editors were trying to strike a balance in emphasis between a story revealing American monitoring of Soviet missile firings and another about the United States launching a satellite called Explorer VI, which was shaped like a paddle wheel.

The paddle wheel came in very handy for the issue of Jan. 21, 1981. Fifty-two Americans who had been held in Iran for more than a year were freed from captivity just as Ronald Reagan was being inaugurated as president.

Most newspapers chose to emphasize the hostage story, to judge from a roundup of front pages contained in “A Design for News,” a 1981 manual by Wallace Allen and Michael Carroll of The Minneapolis Tribune.

The Times chose a different emphasis. We led with the inauguration.

“Reagan Takes Oath as 40th President; Promises an ‘Era of National Renewal’ / Minutes Later, 52 U.S. Hostages in Iran Fly to Freedom After 444-Day Ordeal.”

Not that my opinion was sought in the upper councils (I was then the 28-year-old graphics editor of The Times), but I thought we were making a terrible mistake. I believed that the hostage story, with its inherent drama, was far more important than the inauguration, a completely predictable and highly scripted nonevent.

Today, I would say that history vindicated The Times’s choice. The impact of the Reagan presidency, which began that day, has been profound.

Which suggests, in hindsight, that Mr. Cheney may have been handed the wrong paddle.