[keithvan]

If anything, the Forbes reblog shows how oversensationalized media is expected to be. Even in academia and many peer-reviewed journals, there is a shift towards witty or funny titles in the form of "attention grabber: what this paper really is about". The colon is an imperative. I give an example: "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn". You can find these examples all throughout peer-reviewed journals and books -- this one came from a textbook: A companion to Asian American studies, published by Wiley.

Even academics need to grab attention, too, and it's part of the product of the information economy (where there is a surplus of information) and a scarcity of time (i.e, attention).