Why must the BBC website tease us so?

"Derbyshire town faces severe traffic delays" is the sort of headline that newspapers use to make sure that you buy their paper - if it told you which town in the headline (which would be shorter - normally a virtue in headlines) then only those in the affected town would buy.

We accept this because there seems no other way to fund a local press, and many people feel this is important enough that we allow ourselves to be repeatedly gulled in this way.

But why does the BBC need to copy this? We pay them directly for their news services. So surely they should deliver time-efficient news headlines. They don't need to trick us into clicking on deliberately-vague headlines with a 95% chance that we will have wasted our time: they can let us into the secret at the outset.

So why can't the BBC - on their Derbyshire News site (for example) - headline the item "Alfreton faces severe traffic delays" or "Matlock faces severe traffic delays". That way, I can skip over it if I have no plans to visit the affected town, or read it if I do.

There are two explanations I can see. One is laziness: while a local town name is clearly more appropriate for a story on a Local site (eg BBC Derbyshire), if the story were used nationally, a broader geographical description is appropriate. Forgiveable (but disappointingly clumsy) if the story is one which might garner national attention, but not for stories which are clearly never going to qualify for inclusion in a national feed.

The sadder possibility is that in our target-driven databased managerial culture, nothing is considered real unless there is "evidence" - and unless I can be bullied into clicking on a link about a story, BBC underlings cannot "prove" to higher-ups and politicians that the stories are being valued by those who pay for them. At some point in future, we will look back sadly on this big-numbers-good era of management-by-pocket-calculator and wonder how we could be so clumsy.