Headlines are the guidepost of a newspaper. They help the browsing reader. They signal the consequence or frivolity of a story.

Written by the largely anonymous copy editing corps of the newsroom, headlines capsulate titanic issues and the everyday items that sometimes reach publication.

They employ nuance, occasional wit and, rarely these days, lyrical language that can lift the reader's spirit.

Great headlines live on, sometimes beyond the life of the story.

From the New York Post (mid-1980s):

"Headless Body

In Topless Bar"

Or the Variety headline of Depression days:

"Sticks Nix Hicks Pix," alerting Hollywood that small town moviegoers were avoiding films that featured rural rubes.

And that 1929 doozy - again from Variety:

"Wall Street Lays an Egg"

Could probably trot that out every decade, it seems.

Some headlines are howlers, usually because they are unclear. Consider "Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge," as quoted in the Columbia Journalism Review. Some headlines suffer from double-entendre, so many that Jay Leno built a shtick house on that foundation.

Mostly of all, a headline must be accurate, given appropriate weight and packaged properly with accompanying information.

When that isn't well handled, the reader is misled.

Such was the case Friday when this newspaper reported on the state audit of University of Nebraska credit card transactions.

Led with the stunning figure "$40,000,000," the top headline could be seen as implying that this audit had stumbled onto some vast mismanagement.

In fact, that huge number, as the story correctly reported, was merely the annual dollar volume of the university's credit card program.

About 2,600 employees have the cards and the audit examined a sampling of about 1,600 transactions across 18 months.

The use of the $40 million number in large type and without its proper context readily visible lent an unwarranted spirit of alarm to the headline, and prompted questions about whether the university was fairly treated.

We owe you, our readers, better than that.

The issues related to the audit are serious enough without this presentation foul-up hindering the discussion.