Can I have the brontosaurus instead?

True it is that headline dialects vary, based on register, technology, time, place and what-have-you. Swim at your own risk, kids; try a claim quote among the knowledgeable and you risk being cast as the sort of miscreant who put an American robin at the Banks house in "Mary Poppins."

While "(source):" is a pretty standard American way of putting the attribution at the front of the headline without wasting space on a verb, there's less agreement on how, if at all, to put the attribution at the end without a verb. I've known places where the rule was colon at the beginning, dash at the end:

Officials: Kane caught in love nest with 'singer'
Kane caught in love nest with 'singer' -- officials

But perhaps we can generally agree that the colon attribution at the end of a headline runs the risk of being mistaken for some of the other things colons do, like renaming or expanding on a noun in the first part of the hed. It's clearer inside ("Georgia child finds $40G of meth in box of Legos: officials"), but when I stumble across "Child's dangerous find in box of Legos: officials," all I can think is: damn, I was hoping for the plastic brontosaurus.

Oh, stop it

The only really surprising thing here is that -- for a brief, shining moment, early Friday afternoon -- the jailing of President Trump's former campaign manager made it to the top of the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage. There's a set of rules by which news actors -- even friendly ones -- are known by their given names in Fox headlines, and why not dig up some vaguely Prohibition-sounding term like "pokey" (even correctly bending the rule against using "the" in headlines) for some cheap alliteration on the side? Aside from, you know, that reservation on the unheated cattle train to Siberia for the unfortunate editor who thought the story worth playing up, there's nothing unfamiliar here to the Fox reader.

The Los Angeles Times, on the other hand:

One, "clink." C-L-I-N-K.* Named after a real place, and attested as a term in the OED from about 1530.** Two, whether and to what degree you're pleased by any developments that get closer to the Orange Lord on his Orange Throne -- would you mind leaving a little space where the grownups can talk about it like grownups?

* It probably says something about the state of the world that the top hits on a Google search for "Klink" are for a Pokemon character, rather than you-probably-know-who-if-you're-reading-this.
**  And who else but Kipling would have written "And I'm here in the Clink for a thundering drink and blacking the Corporal's eye"?