Worked for a newspaper for many years. This is a great question.
Good headlines are both intended to give reasonable summaries and drive readers toward articles they’d like to read, because newspapers – and news media congregation systems in general – don’t have a true table of contents, only a series of categories under which article types live. Headlines, at a glance, function as a table of contents in newsprint formats because of this: you can scan for what you find interesting, but don’t have to intake the whole newspaper page to understand what’s being reported.
App scrolling through headlines, then, is functionally the same thing. Just a different UX, is all.
There a handful of approaches that may be helpful for this. I don’t want to make any assumptions on what you’ve tried, yet, though. Would you mind clarifying what you’ve given a go at, so that we don’t offer something that doesn’t do what you’re looking for?