The headline choice is normally best made as an audience-pleasing occupation of the typographic space between the text face and the logo. Though I have no doubt that others may help you, it would be guessing for me to recommend anything without that knowledge,

Cheers!

Whitney Condensed + Mercury Text seems to be a really good choice, you don't want a serif headline font isn't it ?

Christian Schwartz has actually done a version of Amplitude without the extreme trapping for use in newspaper headlines. You can find examples at his site: http://www.christianschwartz.com/amphead.shtml. The fonts are available through the Font Bureau Studio Library.

It sounds like you're looking for a sans serif design. But if you're open to considering a serif face, you might also look at the Whitman Display series, which was originally designed for newspaper commissions. It is currently used by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Tacoma News Tribune, and the Idaho Statesman.

The family has been recently expanded to 7 weights in 3 widths. I posted a few previews in this other thread on a magazine redesign. The fonts are not available in Retail release just yet (we're working on it). But you can contact the Font Bureau for licensing through their Studio Library.

-- K.

Perhaps Lexicon Headline will suit your taste

Thank you for suggestions!

And yes, I'm looking for a sans serif headline. The newspaper in question has used only serif headlines so far and they want to take a little distance to their oldish, conservative image.

kentlew: Beautiful, Amplitude Headline is pretty much just what I'm looking for...! It has edge, but not too much. Its rectangular and round forms make a nice dynamic contrast. It's definitely contemporary, but you can imagine it doesn't get dated too soon. Thanks!

kuroneko: Mercury and Whitney condensed is nice, only thing that bugs me with Whitney is that its angular cut ends have a little too much personality to my taste. Especially words with k's (we have a lot of them in Finnish) tend to look jumpy and unbalanced.

If anyone else has suggestions of headlines with similarity to Whitney Condensed and Amplitude Headline, I'd love to hear them.

BTW: I'm also redesigning their logo, so I can modify its forms based on typographic choices I make.

I'll suggest Shaker from Jeremy Tankard. I recently bought it for my newspaper's redesign as a caption/sidebar font. I have to say that I'm not 100% pleased with how it mixes with Farnham and Merucry, the other typefaces (I think the difference in x-height between them irritates me), but I really liked it when I tried it in headlines as a demo. The italic is especially nice, IMO; I used it for a temporary nameplate while our final one was in the works.

Since you said no serifs, I'll interpret that as not including slab-serifs and point out a few modern ones: Dispatch (and its sans, Stainless), Soho, and Enclave.

If you like Amplitude (and I do too):

FF Meta Headline
FF Sanuk
ITC Officina Display
Sansa
FF Unit
Freight Sans
Fresco Sans
Mundo Sans
FF Strada
Stalemate
Antenna

One of my favorite headline fonts is Hamilton. I find it quite retro but very tabloidish...

Jussi, I’m helping to redesign a local newspaper here in Glendale (circulation 13k, daily, tabloid, established in 1908) and I’m making the fonts for them. :-)

The choices above are very good; some of them I personally like very much. If you'd like to explore the possibility of custom type please get in touch: hpapazian_at_gmail_dot_com. Especially if you go easy on the exclusivity* the costs might be much more reasonable than you suspect.

* Usually one limits the timeframe, but a clever possibility here would be limiting it to exclusivity for publications in Finland, or Finnish-language newspapers worldwide, etc.

hhp