… and beside you can’t plagiarise an idea. Boing Boing reports on a mashup that puts together just the headline of New York Times stories and the final paragraph. The results can be surprisingly illuminating. So I thought I’d try it with the Guardian website – this is a random selection of stories (every second one, starting from the top about five minutes ago):

Beslan terrorist leader killed, reports say
“I admit, I’m a bad guy, a bandit, a terrorist … but what would you call [the Russians]?” he said in an interview with ABC News last year. “If they are the keepers of constitutional order, if they are anti-terrorists, then I spit on all these agreements and nice words.”

Anger at decision not to review paedophile’s sentence
Lord Goldsmith has referred almost 700 cases for review of undue leniency since he took over the top law officer’s job in 2001. In 521 cases, the court agreed, and 414 offenders had their sentences increased.

Police question ex-soldier over family killings
Huma Ahmed, who lives a few doors away from the Purcell family, was in tears as she laid flowers. She said: “They were a really nice family and I am really shocked that something like this could happen. It is really sad and we can’t believe this has happened. We used to see them in the street all the time and would always say hello to each other.”

Kidnapped Israeli soldier is alive, Hamas says
Around 20,000 people staged an anti-Israel demonstration in Turkey’s biggest city, Istanbul, prior to the signing of an agreement between Turkish and Palestinian politicians yesterday. The deal guarantees $1m of business support and 10,000 tonnes of flour as food aid to the Palestinian territories.

Well, it works remarkably well with news stories. (Features might be a bit more puzzling.) It seems it really is time to declare the inverted pyramid dead.

Having just read my way through four British newspapers, Guardian, Times, Independent, Telegraph, I was unsurprised to find a virtually identical headline in all of them – “Gay/Homosexual couple jailed for abusing foster children”.

A small prize (not a Cadbury’s chocolate) to the first reader who can find a headline reading “Hetereosexual couple guilty of…”.

… or at least on the way out.

I’ve always thought that punning headlines are written by journalists for journalists, a form of schoolboy showing off. The occasional real good one might produce a wry smile in me, but usually my response is a groan, since most of them are neither original nor interesting.

And I suspect most readers don’t notice or are at best mildly irritated by them – the way you are annoyed by the school clown showing off by taunting a new teacher when you’d rather listen to what the teacher has to say.

But as Peter Preston says in The Guardian today, Google et al are going to kill such headlines stone dead. No search algorithm, no matter how tricky, is going to understand a pun.

But some things in the media are slower to change. The Guardian profiles Quentin Letts — “Haileybury. Trinity College, Dublin and Jesus College, Cambridge” — the Daily Mail’s parliamentary sketch-writer, theatre critic and author of the paper’s new satirical column, Clement Crabbe”. The interview is conducted in, of course, his London club, where he “lives during the parliamentary season”. His wife stays back in Herefordshire.

He laughs. “I’ve got three children and a wife who has the opposite of a hosepipe ban when it comes to spraying money around. So I’ve got to make hay while the sun shines.”