A headline's job is to provide enough information to encourage someone to read more if the story is relevant to them. If someone doesn't want to read on, no val

A headline's job is to provide enough information to encourage someone to read more if the story is relevant to them. If someone doesn't want to read on, no value is lost. News sites could get rid of their <title> and OpenGraph tags, and people could share the raw story URLs without any context. No-one would click through as they'd have no idea where the URL went, though, so news sites provide these titles willingly and have full control over how they write them or what level of detail they share. The idea that headlines like "Queen Elizabeth has died", "Madonna discharged from hospital", or "Interest rates go up" replace the need for the rest of the story for any substantial part of the target audience seems far fetched to me, and if the meat of the story is given away in the og:description.. they wrote it!