It would seem that the tertiary publishing business is finally trying to catch up to the internet by adapting their headlines for search engines. One of the main side-effects, moreover, is that the effort is decreasing the amount of stylistic nuance being that newspapers have traditionally used in headlines. As the New York Times reports:

The search-engine "bots" that crawl the Web are increasingly influential, delivering 30 percent or more of the traffic on some newspaper, magazine or television news Web sites.
[...]
So news organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers: They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing.
[...]
About a year ago, The Sacramento Bee changed online section titles. "Real Estate" became "Homes," "Scene" turned into "Lifestyle," and dining information found in newsprint under "Taste," is online under "Taste/Food."

Some news sites offer two headlines. One headline, often on the first Web page, is clever, meant to attract human readers. Then, one click to a second Web page, a more quotidian, factual headline appears with the article itself. The popular BBC News Web site does this routinely on longer articles.

Indeed, it seems that written wit may be a casualty of progress. The tertiary publishing industry has been struggling for years to survive the onslaught of free, online content, and often, the biggest challenge they face is their own stubborn, narrow-minded thinking. As the Economic Policy Institute reported in December of 2006, "publishing (non-internet) has lost 91,000 jobs, in part due to internet competition."

Via Alex Moskalyuk.