I develop a model of strategic headline selection in which outlets cannot lie but can strategically choose which truthful component of the underlying information to reveal as a preview when readers can choose whether to pay to access the full article. The main result is that revenue incentives alone can generate misleading yet factually accurate headlines: in equilibrium, a headline can be action-reversing, inducing a fully rational reader to take the opposite action she would take after observing the full article. These distortions can reduce decision quality and generate welfare losses despite hard information constraints and no ideological motives. I then develop a novel empirical strategy to operationalize the model’s key objects and test its implications in large-scale news data. Using a novel dataset of 150,000 U.S. news articles and LLM-based text analysis, I document systematic headline–content divergence consistent with the theory and show that misleading previews are more prevalent when underlying information is more heterogeneous.

I develop a model where media outlets jointly choose which topic to cover (agenda setting) and how to report (editorial slant) under limited consumer attention. I characterize the conditions under which a “curse of popularity” emerges: when a topic becomes sufficiently popular, competing outlets converge on that same issue and—rather than conveying the most informative coverage—have incentives to introduce editorial bias, crowding out other topics and reducing welfare. By contrast, when attention is more dispersed, outlets tend to specialize across topics and (in equilibrium) report more truthfully, improving informational quality and decision-making.

I exploit a unique dataset in which each article appears simultaneously in two attention rankings—Most Viewed and Most Shared—to study how private and public use of news diverge for identical content. I combine these empirical patterns with a simple model of informational and signaling utility. Preliminary results reveal a systematic “scope wedge”: locally useful articles attract more private attention, while nationally framed or identity-related pieces are disproportionately shared. Moreover, contrary to common claims, shared articles are not simpler—they are more sophisticated, consistent with signaling rather than “dumbing down.”