Sons of Liberty Broadside, 1765
The pattern
This still is filed under Question headline.
Define
The first line is a question the reader was already asking, or one they cannot leave unanswered.
Mechanism
Open loop plus recognition. A good question is the reader's objection, spoken first by us.
Verdict
We know the real objection and can answer it in the next breath.
Why it works
The dashed-out word is the whole hook: the compositor prints St-p as if the word were unprintable, the way newspapers dashed out libellous names, and by repeating the gag three times turns it into a chant a barely literate crowd can shout from a glance. Urgency is manufactured from specificity rather than adjectives, a named man, a named tree, a named hour, THIS DAY set in capitals, which collapses the distance between reading the paper and walking to the spot. The one-line kicker at the foot pre-empts the single objection that would keep a man at home, whether the resignation is really going to happen, and answers it with a self-posed question and a flat YES, which is objection handling in its earliest printed form. Running the opening line at display size and letting it break mid-word into text size also saves the printer a separate headline setting and still yields a headline.
Steal this when
Steal this when you need bodies at a specific place and hour today and your only asset is a piece of news the audience already cares about. Also steal the self-posed closing question whenever the one thing blocking action is doubt that the promised event will actually occur.