Higher

I love RSS feeds. They save me frequent, fruitless trips to websites in search of the latest information, news and views. Instead, like room service, these things are delivered to me when ready. There are a few exceptions: I recently discovered that one site feeds me four or five-day old bread, while paying subscribers get theirs fresh-from-the-oven. The downside for the well-heeled—Get it? Like the heels on a loaf of bread? Never mind.—is that they must to go to kitchen and fetch it from the oven themselves.

When a feed item comes to me, I must decide whether to read it or pass it by. Frequently, an item’s title (like the one above) reveals very little about its content. As a remedy, host-sites offers content providers and bloggers like me these alternatives: 1) Send the entire text of the item and, sometimes, its images too; 2) Include the opening—a sentence or as much as a couple of paragraphs—as a teaser; or, 3) Create a more revealing subtitle. I use option 1, the full text approach. Option 2 works well only when a juicy topic sentence appears early on. That clearly wouldn’t work for me. Hell, we’re already two paragraphs into this post and I haven’t told you what it’s about.

I subscribe to the New York Times Op-Ed feed, which includes items from “The Opinionator.” Several times a day, this blog introduces a hot issue or news item, quotes relevant, often antithetical sources of expert or popular opinion, then solicits readers’ reactions. Using option 3, they use a single-sentence subtitle to add focus to an occasionally vague main title.

[Thus endeth the reading of the back-story.]

Three days ago I received a feed item with this title and subtitle:

The Opinionator: Pot to Be Legal in 2022?
The percentage of Americans in favor of legalizing marijuana is getting higher.

I’m just wondering if the subtitle should have read:

The percentage of Americans in favor of legalizing marijuana are getting higher.

But, you can’t have a subtitle without s-u-b-t-l-e.