Static Title for Blog Page

I’d like to know if it’s possible to give the blog page a title controlled by user input from the WP dashboard.

I’m developing a custom theme for some clients. I’m using a static page as the homepage. The blog is working fine, but I’d like to add a semi-static title to the blog that they can update from the dashboard, as they would with any of the other pages. When I put <?php the_title(); ?> in index.php it merely displays the title of the first post listed on index.php. Currently I’ve hardcoded the title “News” into index.php, which looks fine, but feels like a kludge.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
A.