Admittedly it was not our best headline.

On Nov. 29, we ran an Associated Press story out of Baghdad with this lead paragraph: "U.S. soldiers fought with suspected insurgents using a building as a safe house in Ramadi yesterday, killing one Iraqi man and five girls, ranging in age from an infant to teenagers, the U.S. military said."

Our headline? "U.S. soldiers kill five girls."

Technically, the headline was correct but it gave no context about the killings and understandably, we had some angry readers.

Which brings me to today's topic and one that gets asked repeatedly: Who writes your headlines?

As a reporter, I was quick to point out to people who read my stories and complained about the headlines that I was not responsible. As an editor responsible for everything that appears, I've heard from countless subjects of stories who complain the headline did not accurately reflect the news report.

So let's get to it. Copy editors write headlines, and for the rare clunker that gets into the paper, there are hundreds of gems. Copy editors also write captions for photos and edit stories for clarity, grammar, spelling and style.

Reporters aren't involved because they're usually not here by the time the headlines are ready to be written late into the evening, and not many are clamoring to do so. I have seen some reporters who put suggested headlines on top of stories, but these usually prove worthless because headlines have to fit into tight spaces reporters have no way of measuring beforehand.

Luckily, we have one of the best headline writers in Hawai'i, stolen from a competitor a couple of years ago. Steve Petranik, our news editor, is masterful at summing up a story in a few choice words. He leads a superior copy desk of editors who help him do the same.

"Headline writing is difficult because you have to sum up a story in about six words, do it 10 to 20 times a night and still make deadline," Petranik said. "Those few words have to persuade people to read the story and must be different from recent headlines on the same subject. Nothing turns readers off more than a headline that tells them something they already know."

Petranik points out that the headlines must be brief but they must grab someone's attention. If something captures my eye when I'm in a hurry, I'm more likely to invest those minutes with the story with the best headline. Readers today don't have the kind of time they once did and so headlines are more important than ever.

When it comes to big front-page stories like disasters or election results, headlines are usually written by a committee of editors. After all, it's more fun to write a headline on a defining story of the year than on a brief about a bake sale, so even amateur headline writers (like me) are heavily involved.

Headlines are arranged in a hierarchy of sizes so as to be a guide for readers searching for what we believe is the most important story. Editors and readers can debate the importance and play of each story (and many readers call me to do just that), but we start with the notion that because you are buying the newspaper (or reading our Web version) that you are trusting us to tell you what's interesting and important. We try to make it easier by assigning the most important stories the largest headlines. The main headline on Page One is always at least 60 points, or about an inch tall. October's earthquake headlines were even larger.

The reason that readers sometimes complain about the headline and not the story is because a headline of three or four words cannot get into all the nuances of a 600-word story. So whatever is left out is often criticized. Or readers will find a certain angle of a story they considered important not touched upon in the headline. Sure, the copy editors sometimes get it wrong, but it's not very often we have to correct a headline. And usually at least two editors and maybe more are reading behind the headline writer.

If a headline seems too large or sensational, we often get accused of "just trying to sell newspapers." Well, we are trying to sell newspapers. That's our business. But I like copy editor John Strobel's description a bit better.

"Sitting as a news editor for a quarter century, I was often accused of trying to sell newspapers with sensational heads," he said. "I can honestly respond that I never did so, that our job is to let the news sell the paper. And it is our job to write inviting headlines."

And so we do.