Quartz turns one year old today, so we’re giving our readers a birthday present. Along with heartfelt thanks for helping Quartz grow over the past year, please enjoy the Quartz Headline Generator, which you can find above.
We’ve written thousands upon thousands of headlines since our launch, from the odd to the iconic to the intriguing. The Quartz Headline Generator takes all of those real Quartz headlines, chops them into pieces, and tries to logically smash them back together to form fake Quartz headlines that sound like they could be real.
Think of it like a linguistic collage. Some will make sense, others not so much. But they should all have the ring of Quartz journalism that we’ve been producing for the past 12 months.
Our algorithm looks for pairs of words that appear next to each other in real headlines. It then remembers those relationships while remixing the words into new, fake headlines (sort of like the “Before & After” category on game show Wheel of Fortune). The technique is called Markov chaining.
To start things off, the program picks a random word from among those that we have previously used to to start a headline. Then we go and find a word that has come after it in a real headline. The process is repeated from there until we have a string of words about the length of a headline. And there you have it: a new, totally fake but eerily real Quartz headline.
If you encounter any particularly good fake headlines, feel free to email them to us at hi@qz.com. Enjoy!