Its fairly traditional to arrange a document so that body text is divided into multiple columns, while the section headings above the text stretch across the whole page (like a newspaper headline over the bulk of an article). However, I can’t figure out how to do this in Libreoffice except by tediously inserting each new heading as a new section. This seems like something that should be doable using Styles, but I haven’t found it. Is there such an option, or at least a different but comparable simple approach?
If you set up the layout with excess alternating sections before adding any text and save as template you’ll have to do it only once. It is a workaround.
Open new document, add a couple of returns, set first line as Heading 1 then insert section with 2 columns, copy and paste the Heading and section just created under the 2 column section, repeat copy and paste of the 2 headings and sections. Repeat paste to make 50 or more stubs for articles. Save as Template. Open new from template, write the document using the headings lines, click in the 2-column section to write the text body and at the end, select and delete any unused headings and sections.
Thanks. It’s not ideal, but sometimes it’s easier to do quick and dirty 
If you alternate 1-column and n-column parts in the same page, there is no other solution than manually inserting sections.
The only styles containing a column parameter are page styles. You could think to take the problem the other round, i.e. define your page to be 2-column by default and insert a 1-column section where you need headings. This does not work because the page style defines the basic page layout. Additional sections will be inserted within the existing columns, i.e. inserting a 3-column section in a 2-column page will end up with 6 columns.
If your headings can be synchronised with page breaks, as is frequently the case for chapters, these headings can be sent to the header (and repeated on every page unless you restrict it on the first page only). But having the heading only in the header (and not both in text and header) and still automatically in the TOC is quite tricky. This requires a combination of visible and hidden text in the same paragraph plus tweaking the paragraph style to put it seemingly outside the text flow.
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Its fairly traditional to arrange a document so that body text is divided into multiple columns, while the section headings above the text stretch across the whole page (like a newspaper headline over the bulk of an article).
Yes, and that is exactly what desktop publishing programs are for.
A pure word processing program is unfortunately overstrained for this purpose.
Try Scribus:
Wikipedia contributors. (2020, July 20). Scribus. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 07:10, July 26, 2020, from Scribus - Wikipedia