Headlines and captions

Sub editors are the newspaper equivalents of set piece coaches. They operate largely in the background but occasionally come up with an absolute gem. Like today in the Times where a photo was captioned "Flora Phillips became a butcher because she loves animals". What? In the article Flora says "I tried liver for the first time and it was a straight shot in the veins...I couldn't believe it was possible to see and eat an organ of an animal....It blew my mind". So basically she loves dead, eviscerated animals. I'd advise her cat to keep her distance.

On the same page we get "Bunfight over street artist's burger mural next to McDonald's". Now the Times comes nowhere near the tabloid press in witty headlines but at least this is a decent try. Maybe 4/10.

On page 7 we have the news that the 13 times winner of the Times Crossword Championship has won the first ever World Cryptic Crossword Championships. You'd have thought this eminently worthy of a cryptic headline but the sub-editor had already butchered their way to the end of the day and all we get is "Cryptic fans square off for first world title". Now it's possible this is a monumental anagram but I couldn't see that; you'd have thought some kind of crypticism would have occurred to them.

I don't know how much newspapers use AI for headline writing but I asked ChatGPT for some help.

“Across the World and Down to the Wire: Global Minds Battle for Crossword Crown” is not particularly good and wouldn't fit the page so I asked for more tabloidy. "Clue-mageddon!" is more front page Daily Star; "Across! Down! Out Cold!" perhaps would suit The Sun. Still unsatisfactory. So I asked for an anagram of the Times' headline "Cryptic fans square off for first world title" and was given "Two old rivals sport cut-throat, fierce snuff cry" which is awesome, although inaccurate so I asked it to try again and finally it came up with "Crossword fight: top clan fuels first title fury"

I was not convinced this was a perfect anagram so I asked ChatGPT to check and it said:

Nope — “Crossword fight: top clan fuels first title fury” is not a perfect anagram of “Cryptic fans square off for first world title.” It’s a near miss — stylish, thematic, but technically not a valid anagram.

I was still not convinced so I actually got out pencil and paper. And it's right, it's not an anagram. So why give it to me? It blathered on about needing brute force software so, in the interests of not crashing the national grid, I gave up. But at least I tried, which I suspect is more than last night's sub-editor who obviously went home.