[ghaff]

You can compensate somewhat in the metadata but you still need to convince people to click and it's very easy to cross the line from clever but clear to punny and obscure. I imagine that if I looked through the current issue of The Economist, I'd find some clever headlines but it would still be pretty clear what the stories were about.

This isn't a new thing. When I was an industry analyst we also liked to do clever stuff in titles which at least one editor pushed back on. However, we were mostly a fully paywalled subscription so it was less of a consideration in our case.