What counts as a headline?

We received this question from Cathy concerning the headline category: Can overlines/photo kickers be entered as headlines?

Overlines, for the most part, should be considered one part of a total headline. So, while you wouldn’t enter an overline by itself, you could enter it with the primary headline. (This presumes we're both defining overlines as a small headline that appears above the main headline. Unfortunately newspaper terms many times are unique to particular newspapers and the same word can mean different things at different papers.)

Photo kickers (as in the headlines above a cutline) might be a bit more tricky to categorize. In a sense they are headlines, but not for what we consider a traditional story. In the end, this would really come down to what the specific person judging your category thinks about it. If it was me judging, I might not reject a photo kicker as a headline, but I’d probably not give it as much weight as a story headline. In the absence of a rule prohibiting it, you should be able to enter a photo kicker, but would you really want to take a chance? A simple piece of advice: I wouldn't.