My players often check the headlines as a way to see if what they did was noticed, and I've often rolled luck dice to determine if something more interesting has happened to cause their story to be buried, but have had trouble coming up with interesting headlines.

In fact, the best headlines were from a concurrent run that the PC's didn't know was being done with another group: "hospital attacked twice, video footage of attackers recovered, story at 11" (they showed video of the same people coming to the hospital and 1. killing a patient 2. coming in guns-blazing to extract the one who killed the patient the first time (she was handcuffed to the bed after being caught in her own explosion))

What headlines have you caused?

Citizen Rescues Children in Car Bomb Attack

Just so happens it was the "citizen's" car bomb...

The Seattle Intelligencer is a good resource for this very thing.

Hijacked bus used to slay SURGED alagator. More details after these messages...

^insert San Fransisco tourism comercial^

^cut to Troll woman with crying baby^ Tha... thar was this awful rumbling noise... than tha street cracked like an egg... an up popped this gator... I was tellin ya that there's gators down in tha sewers... now... tha Orc an' tha idiot with a machine gun come crawling up afters it... Ow man that was just an awful racket... that bucket of bolts couldn't hold on to his gun an bullets was a flyin'... When tha gator turned an bit 'em in half... Swallowed tha gun whole I tell yas... Well... tha Orc turned an run like scared little *beep*... Tha whole block was screaming and running like tha Night of Rage all over again... We was fearen for our lives...When a bus came screaming around tha corner an plowed right inta tha gator... Tha gator took two more steps, an then fell down... I tells ya that Orc was a hero... Too bad about tha 'Star shooting him like that... Tha was just aweful too I suppose...

Ah...I'll need to look through my files to see what my characters did...

Though I find the subject humorous, since the object of many shadowruns is to be, you know, shadow, sneaky and subtle.

We all know how well that usually turns out.

"Renraku Arcology Assaulted by Lofwyr; Brave Citizens Sacrifice Selves to Stop Dragon"

You don't want to know. That was the most FUBARed set of events and screw-ups ever commited by a SR group that managed to live (well, a couple managed to live).

"Gator Spirit Goes on Rampage, Destroys City Block"

A summoning attempt gone horribly, horribly wrong. Fragging surges.

"Seattle Universal Brotherhood Offices destroyed in conflaguration"

We took the Missing Blood job and got miffed when they tried to assassinate our troll samurai and accidently cost his little sister her arm. Cost us each 20K but we hired ever runner in town and declared a Shadow War.

"Aztechnology pyramid in flames."

We sent in a drone armed with a MGL-12 and hidden by improved invisibility and it rolled all ones on it's first attack while loading WP grenades. Distraction worked quite well. lol

20k for every runner in town. I'd say you guys got a deal

Yeah, I'd say you dropped at least one, probably two zeroes there.

~J

Actually it was 20k a piece (for a group of 14 by the way) and the call in of many favors and general looting of the building. It was easy to get the magical community in on the deal. And every Troll in town was already outraged over the whole incident with the little troll girl. Oh, did I forget to mention we were handing out Colt M22A2's and 5 clips of APDS to all the gun bunnies?

Sometimes it's fun to have the headline something like, "School Budget In Review" after they get done.

They'll wonder why the hell their story isn't in the paper and get paranoid.

I think my players just assume their characters check the headlines on a regular basis, which I think is perfectly reasonable, but it does lead to a bad situation. Every time I try to give them info via headlines, it looks forced. If I say something like "today you see a headline about a robbery at blah blah blah.." then that robbery is a little more at top of their minds than it should be. It's kinda like when you see news clips in a movie. You know those news clips probably wouldn't be there if there wasn't going to be some connection to the plot later on. I know it's just bad GMing that I don't come up with 20 or so headlines every time we run, but that kind of thing just gets exhausting after a while.

As for characters getting paranoid when stuff they've done or seen doesn't show up in the scream sheets, my group just got done with a run where I was experimenting around with making our game a little darker, and the "good" NPC (the one that wasn't a sadistic free spirit, a powerful blood mage, or an Alamos 20K terrorist) killed a few apartment buildings full of people, which the corps covered up just to maintain the status quo. My problem now is that I'm not sure I can really make the assumption that the characters have even been checking headlines due to the fact that they've been busy, and if they did, I don't think I'd want to point out that "hey, look what was left out." Worse yet, we've moved on a couple weeks. I think the best I can hope for is one of them eventually saying "hey, was this ever on the news?" and me being able to say "Not that you saw"

PCs checking the news after a fairly blatant run in mid-December:

<John[GM]> The lead story is talking about an elderly dwarf who got picked up for breaking and entering on the 24th
<Yngvi> breaking and entering, you say.
<John[GM]> Yeah. They aren't sure how he was getting into places, and he didn't appear to be taking anything, but several homeowners spotted him over the course of the night.
<John[GM]> He ended up getting tasered by one of them, and they held him until the Star finally responded to their call.
<Yngvi> hee.
<Yngvi> that's so terribly wrong.
<Yngvi> (Items stolen: 1/2 glass milk, 3 cookies. Consumed.)
<Xavier> ...
<Xavier> They found a bag of loot on him, so he was obviously taking things from somewhere.

Time flies when you're on the run...