“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

To be fair, there’s a big difference between journalists and headline writers!

Headline writing is the art of taking something that a journalist has thought about in detail and carefully crafted and making it into something that someone with low to zero interest in the topic might want to read.

Having done both, I got annoyed when headlines misrepresented what I’d written, and journalists got annoyed when I took their perfectly crafted but pedestrian articles and gave them punchy headlines in a desperate attempt to get people to read them...

Fair enough! Also, to the credit of headline writers, I have sometimes clicked on a clickbait article and learned something. If it hadn't been clickbait, I might have missed it.

You've made all headline writers a little happier by saying that!