Satire, I think. Sadly, the idea that SEO has killed the art of artsy headline writing is pretty prevalent in the media industry, in which traditional j-school courses have classes devoted to copy-writing/headlines, and in which "Headless body found in topless bar" is the gold standard.<p>That is a pretty good headline, and one that doesn't need to be optimized (unless the body belonged to someone relatively famous), or the stripper bar was owned by a city councilmember. But the point of SEO is to make content accessible in the long-tail...A headline celebrating the home team finally winning the Super Bowl, "YES! FINALLY!", has some poetic power but its impact is in its <i>context and display</i>...that is, 160-pt font across the top with huge celebratory photos.<p>But "YES! FINALLY!" doesn't tell you anything about the story when viewed a week later in a search engine or archive results. It's strange that newspapers, which pride themselves on being the official recordkeepers of history, often have such a dim view of the importance of SEO...which really, when done with non-black-hat intentions, is <i>reader-optimized</i> text.<p>Edit: one more point...many news editors who hate on SEO still seem to be unaware that you can do a SEO headline in the meta tags while preserving the pithy headline for he we page display...so it's not even really a dilemma between art and business, just technical ignorance.