So here’s the traditional pecking order of writers: journalists are at the top, those paragons of probing prolixity and unbiased storytelling. Public relations professionals are perhaps a rung lower – still able to craft press releases, articles and pitches that could stand alone as news stories if need be, but always telling the story from the point of view of an organization. At the bottom of the ladder? Sales copywriters. Those feeble hacks who resort to drama, fear and exclamation points to attract an audience. (We’ll leave the poets and novelists alone for now.)

While PR pros are traditionally trained to emulate the journalist when writing, the tables have turned: we need to start writing like sales copywriters. At least in our headlines.

It’s no secret that audiences are bombarded with messages these days, across mediums. Bombarded. We naturally look for ways to parse, sort and filter information to determine what’s important and immediate. In many cases, we do this based on a single line of text: the subject of an email, the post title in our RSS reader, the headline of a press release or news story. You could write the grandest, juiciest, most interesting press release ever, but if a reporter never opens the email, does it really matter?

If a press release falls in the forest…

I’ve been running a lot of email campaigns lately at work and the part that hangs me up like no other is writing the subject line. How can I get customers or prospects to open the email to actually get to the great content I’ve written? At most, I’ve got 40-50 characters to entice them (that’s a third of a tweet, by the way). When blogging, I usually save the post title for last, and often agonize over it. And, when readMedia clients send press releases over our wire, the headline of the release becomes the subject line of the email that reporters receive. A weak subject line means a press release might be deleted before the contents are even known.

Good writing is for naught if you can’t get anyone to read it. We rarely focused on headline writing in journalism school years ago (and writing headlines for print is very different than writing them for the web. So long, puns). We were committed to learning the inverted pyramid and AP style. The focus was on telling the story, and the thought of attracting people to read it was, well, not a thought at all.

A sales copywriter’s singular goal is to get someone to DO something: click a link, give up an email address, buy a product, request more information. Sales copy is compelling – not from a “hey, that’s interesting” perspective, but from a “wow, I need to do that” perspective. Why do magazines like Cosmo and GQ have those ridiculous blurb teasers on the cover? To do exactly that – to tease. To convince people that they have to pick up the magazine and read the article.

I’m not suggesting we should all start adding exclamation signs and dollar symbols and phrases like “Special Offer! Act now!” to our headlines and post titles. But we do need to start giving them some more thought. And we need to be thinking about optimizing our writing for search (Robert Niles even thinks learning SEO should now take precedence over learning AP style in j-schools).

The headline or title can no longer be an afterthought. It needs to be informative AND compelling. We need to be reading Copyblogger and learning how to adapt those sales copywriting techniques to public relations writing (and not feel snide about it).

We need to get people to open up — literally — and get to the good stuff.