Half a Tweet! Gawker Headlines Max Out At 70 Characters Tomorrow

Choire Sicha
The Awl
Published in
1 min readApr 11, 2013

Gawker Media honcho Nick Denton issued an edict this morning: headlines for his sites running on his Kinja system will now be auto-truncated to 70 characters. He’s doing this to appease Google and Facebook. Apparently, the company couldn’t identify a technical solution yet to issue different headlines to different venues. Most publishers send out different headlines to Facebook, Twitter, their sites and for Google. (For instance, there’s a couple free WordPress plugins that do this, just FYI.) The sites will also shorten summaries on sites, like here, to convey more information.

Let’s see how today’s Gawker headlines stack up at 70 characters!

• ‘Religious Freedom’-Fighting NC Lawmaker Opposes Islamic Prayer in Leg

• Rising GOP Star Drops Out of Commencement Over Gay Marriage-Bestiality

• Girl Arrested for Faking Cancer and Spending Thousands in Donations on

• How You Can Use an Android Phone to Hijack (or Crash) a Plane from the

• Home Depot Customers Watch In Horror As Man Attempts to Saw Off His Ow

• Anonymous Threatens to Expose Nova Scotia Girl’s Rapists; Mother Discu

• Thousands of Syrian Civilians Are Being Killed in Deliberate Air Strik

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