I’ve noticed the headline/story gap frequently at the Times. Headlines change a lot there, particularly over the weekend. In my head I’ve written this little workplace drama about how the weekend headline-creating staff is politically further to the left than the management, so they’ll put some remarkably blunt headline about how some politician’s current mis-step shows his true colors as a totalitarian nutcase, and the headline lasts for about three hours until somebody higher up the food chain sees it and changes it. The story in my head is slightly exaggerated, but only slightly: the second-draft headline is always more neutral and anodyne than the first-draft one. And sometimes neither the original, in-your-face version nor the toned-down version actually matches the tone of the story. (I should have kept a list of examples. A year or two ago, there was a period of 2 or 3 months when there was a Weekend of Shifting Headlines at least every other week.)