Ten ways to score B2B news take-away value

When judging publishing industry editorial competitions, my most challenging category often is the Best Headline event. In the past, I restricted my evaluation to headlines accompanying feature articles. This year, I expanded the scope to account for treatments involving cover, contents page, and editorial columns.

The result is the following ten-point scoring system. If you decide to use it, feedback would be appreciated:

1. Covers should carry at least five active story lines.
2. Contents page should abandon tired headings—such as “features,”  “departments,” or “news”—in favor of descriptions of specific, high-interest topics covered.
3. Editorial columns should include headline plus at least one supporting element . . . such as a call-out.
4. Feature article head-deck combos should not be echo chambers. Instead, the deck should elaborate on rather than simply duplicate the headline message.
5. Short heads—like two-three words—are okay if they go beyond offering kicker value.
6. Use active verbs in all feature and department headlines.
7. Declare war on label usage everywhere—that includes subheads, captions, sidebars.
8. Use story-telling jump lines running across the page as opposed to one-column corner slugs.
9. Angle some of your story assignments to allow for use of heads with attention-getting numbers.
10. Data-driven articles should include numbers in accompanying headline and deck.

Scoring for this approach will be weighted based on factor importance.  Right now, my vote for higher-priority consideration would go to items 1, 4, 7, and 9. What do you think?