The title is clickbait, because it deliberately withholds key information to force readers to click. A non-clickbait title would be:
"Pollution suspected of causing rare cancers in Waycross, GA"
"Pollution suspected of causing rare cancers in Waycross, GA"
Otherwise, it's not all that bad - just clever headline choice. (The point of headlines has always been to intrigue prospective readers, after all.)
Since this article is a substantial piece of journalism that remains interesting if you know the tl;dr, rather than an insubstantial chunk of #content, I don't think it really counts as clickbait.
Did this change at some point? Or is this just tabloid practices infecting journalism in the era of maximizing clicks? I find the old model infinitely better especially as people tend not to read past headlines in most cases.
Which would have been a better headline on, say 9/11?
A: “U.S. Attacked - Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers”
B: “Something Awful Happened in NYC Today. Click here to find out what!”
That's arguably worse than clickbait. It actually discourages people from reading the article who might find it interesting.
It suffers from being both too specific and too general at the same time.
It's too specific because Waycross, GA, is a town of under 14k people and as far as I can see there is no reason to expect that many people outside of Georgia to have ever heard of it. Naming it in the headline suggests that the story is aimed at those people who do recognize it.
It's too general because of course it is pollution. The other things that cause cancer don't tend to cause cancer spikes in small areas.
Both the town and the cause are actually incidental to this story. The interesting aspects of the story are how the various parties reacted when some started noticing there might be a cancer cluster.