Today I saw the following headline on WRAL’s website:

Man in Light Shooting Hands out Bears

Despite staring at it for some time, I found myself completely unable to parse this. Too many of the words can be interpreted as multiple different parts of speech.

I don’t understand this phenomenon. Historically, headline writing was an art that editors had to learn, because in a newspaper you have very little space to work with. (I actually studied this in a news editing class, back in my J-school days.) But why should this be a factor online?