Small Earthquake in Chile

“Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead” is a famous example of a dull headline. The journalist Claud Cockburn is said to have written it in the early 1930s, in a competition among sub-editors at The Times for the dullest headline. Some quote it as “not many hurt.”

No copy of The Times with that headline has been found. The line did appear decades later in Not the Times, a spoof made by Times journalists in 1979.

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