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Don’t be too clever; this is for the Web

Published on April 10th, 2006

Journalists over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences: fickle readers and nitpicking editors.

Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The search-engine “bots” that crawl the Web are increasingly influential, delivering 30 percent or more of the traffic on some newspaper, magazine or television news Web sites. And traffic means readers and advertisers, both of which the media are desperate for.

So news organizations have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers. They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing.

Whether search engines will influence journalism below the headline is uncertain. The natural-language processing algorithms, search experts say, scan the title, headline and at least the first 100 words of news articles. Journalists, they say, would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the most frequently searched words that relate to their subject – and then include some in the first few sentences.

Such suggestions stir mixed sentiments. “My first thought is that reporters and editors have a job to do and they shouldn’t worry about what Google’s or Yahoo’s software thinks of their work,” said Michael Schudson, a sociologist and visiting faculty member at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

“But my second thought is that newspaper headlines and the presentation of stories in print are in a sense marketing devices to bring readers to your story,” he said. “Why not use a new marketing device appropriate to the age of the Internet and the search engine?”

Learn the technology, folks. Then decide how to use it. Is it any different from deciding the demographic of your target reader — then, writing to that standard?

4 users responded in " Don’t be too clever; this is for the Web "

# 1 rizzn said, on April 10th, 2006 at 10:09 am

To be certain, a degree of sticking to the subject is required (or should be) when writing a headline, but shouldn’t headline writers write their headlines the way they always have and let the search engine technology catch up to them? I know once this subject is broached and the cat is out of the bag, its a moot point, eventually everyone is going to start writing to ‘the new standard.’ Unfortunately, I think it may have an adverse affect in the ability of technology to actually rise to meet the challenge of doing what it wanted to do when it set out to index news articles.

# 2 V said, on April 10th, 2006 at 5:48 pm

So who here remembers meta data? And why haven’t we come up with this as an obvious solution to identifying articles yet?

# 3 SN said, on April 10th, 2006 at 5:52 pm

“So who here remembers meta data?”

Google (and others) don’t use meta tags because they can be easily faked. E.g., you could put the term “Pamela Anderson” in the meta tag even though the site has nothing to do with her.

# 4 em said, on April 11th, 2006 at 2:13 am

From the http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

# Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
# Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
# Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.

If you site is not about what your meta tags say it is you will be downrated by Google (and I presume others).

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