In its revived form, the headline is finding relevance far beyond news media as it becomes a key weapon in fields like politics and business. No longer the exclusive province of copy editors, it is now the cornerstone of emailed political appeals, the fulcrum of crowdsourcing capital on Kickstarter, and arguably the basis of an entire communications medium, the all-headlines microblogging system Twitter.

A new vanguard of hype masters is testing the limits of the headline’s power, hoping to accelerate the democratization of media, capital flows, and even political messaging. They rewrite headlines dozens of times for a single post; they build software to automatically compare the performance of competing headlines in real time; and they find ways to convert clicks to piles of money.