Headline Headaches

Thanks to CNN's e-mail alert system for alerting me to a story by Marc Saltzman, a technolgoy freelancer for Gannett News Service. The story is headlined Expand games with music, video add-ons, which is a fine headline, as that is what the story is actually about. It's the sub-headline that confused me something awful:



Game console accessories can add depth to your game play. Add-on controllers make driving and flying games more realistic, and memory cards let you save games so you can continue your play later.



While these sentences are technically true, they have absolutely nothing to do with the article in question. The short article, which discusses the EyeToy and XBox Music Mixer, mentions nothing about steering wheels or flight joysticks. Saltzman does note that the PS2 memory card can be used to record short video messages with the EyeToy, but as far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with saving games "so you can continue to play later."



How does a headline like this get published? Did some mid-level editor simply do a google search for "video game accesories"and write a sub-headline based on the results? Is the editor being bought off by some maker of steering wheels and flight sticks that insisted he mention their products in his headline? Did he think that the fact that you need a memory card to save games nowadays was especially newsworthy?



None of these are very likely, but it's hard for me to picture any other way that a headline and a story could have so little to do with each other. I welcome your theories.