I've worked as a local news reporter for eight years, and I'm convinced that clickbait headlines are destroying journalism. When a story about a city council meeting gets framed as 'You won't believe what your tax money paid for,' we're not informing readers—we're baiting them. Yes, clickbait drives traffic, but at the cost of trust, and once that's gone, we're just noise. Should news outlets prioritize engagement metrics over accurate, boring headlines to survive?