September 24, 2026
This week I had to write fifteen headlines for one press release.
When I first read the instruction, fifteen felt like too many.
I already knew what my press release was about: Adobe had introduced new AI capabilities in Acrobat that could help people work with complex documents and transform information into things such as presentations, audio, visual reports, and other content.
Surely I could find the headline after three attempts.
I was wrong about that.
Every headline changed the story slightly
My first instinct was to put Adobe, Acrobat, and AI into the headline. That seemed logical. They are the obvious keywords.
Then I started trying other versions.
Should the headline focus on Adobe announcing something new? Should it focus on the Productivity Agent? Should it tell readers that Acrobat can turn documents into presentations and audio? Or should it focus on making document work faster?
Those are all connected to the same announcement, but they do not make the same promise to the reader.
That was the part of the exercise I did not expect.
Writing fifteen headlines was not really about finding fifteen ways to say the same sentence. It forced me to choose fifteen slightly different doors into the same story.
It reminded me of graphic design
This problem felt familiar because I deal with something similar when designing.
On a poster, I cannot make everything large.
The event name may be important. The date is important. The location matters. The call to action matters. The logo matters to the client. Sometimes everybody wants their information to be the first thing people see.
But if I make everything dominant, nothing is dominant.
A headline has the same limitation, except the space is made of words.
I cannot explain the whole press release in eight words. I have to decide which part deserves to meet the reader first.
Short writing can take longer
That is probably what surprised me most.
A short headline looks easier than a paragraph because there are fewer words. In practice, fewer words mean that each one has more work to do.
Some of my headline options were accurate but dull. Others sounded better but left out information I thought mattered. A few became too long because I kept trying to save every detail.
By the fifteenth version, I understood the story better than I did when I wrote the first.
That was unexpected. I thought I was practicing headlines.
I was also practicing how to decide what matters.
