Yes. God, yes.

Question-based headlines prompt a more negative response from readers as well as a more negative expectation of the story that follows compared to traditional news headlines, showed a report published on 9 August by the Engaging News Project.

Remember the rule of thumb: if the headline is a question, the answer is almost always "no." Headline writing has, in recent years, transformed from an art form — a good headline is a piece of writing that communicates with the piece as well as promoting the piece — into an impossibly dry chunk of information.

Why did it change? Well, social media. Headlines have to be designed to grab people on Facebook, which means you can't write a headline with the assumption that someone will read the attached story. (Ask anyone who works in social media and you'll learn that a disturbing number of people on Facebook like and share articles based solely on the information available in the headline. You and I, of course, would never do that.) So question headlines are seen as best, because they provide information, but they aslo force you to click through to see what the answer to the question is.

Of course, anyone with half a brain could predict that news consumers were going to get sick of being played like that. And so now Facebook has declared war on clickbait and publishers risk losing even more eyeballs. Could this be the end of question headlines? (I refer you to the rule of thumb in the third paragraph for the answer to this question.)