15 Oct Globe spikes a reporters view on SEO
This post has been updated below.
One of the team behind the In Other Words blog at the Globe and Mail has nothing good to say about a recent search engine optimization class at Front Street HQ; the post started like this:
This isn't about books. But it is about words.
Last week, our headline on the review for Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist was one of those sweetly goofy and slightly shopworn plays on words that newspapers are rightly famous and infamous for. The book is about a self-doubting poet in midlife crisis mulling (and procrastinating) over an essay about rhyme; the headline was "The marinating of the ancient rhymer."
I'm not going to explain that headline to anyone, because there is no point. We in the Books section had a good laugh about it. It's the kind of fun you can get away with at a newspaper, and we went about our self-congratulatory way all pleased with ourselves.
Our merriment came to a screeching halt on Tuesday after I went to a seminar on search engine optimization and discovered that it was actually a really really crappy headline. I learned that this kind of badinage, so peculiar to newspapers, has no place on the Internet. The reason is both simple and deranged: The most important reader of Internet news headlines is not you, the sentient, curious human being, but the robots at Google that scan headlines and return search results based on what their cold, lifeless eyes tell them.
It only gets better from there! At first I was just going to point you towards the blog post to read the rest. But, as I was blogging this the post went down; good thing I copied and pasted the text; if not the authors name (argh).
Update: Globe and Mail's Matthew Ingram responds on his blog in a post titled The Story Behind the Deleted Post. I'm pleased the Globe is being upfront and transparent with their readers.
Here is the full text of the Globe & Mail rant that was on their site; embedded via Scribid:
Globe & Mail spikes post: Headline Writing for Robots
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Walking the walk on transparency » Nieman Journalism Lab (October 16th, 2009 at 9:01am)
[...] post (which you can read in full at this blog, which grabbed a copy shortly after it appeared) was about search engine optimization or SEO, which [...]
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Ethics of social media for journalists | Save the Media (October 19th, 2009 at 11:34am)
[...] The pulled blog post: The Globe and Mail’s book editor attended a search-engine optimization seminar at the newspaper and then blogged critically on the newspaper’s Web site about the worshop. According to Ingram’s explanation, the books editor felt the workshop stressed too much that online headlines should be understandable to search engines, rather than people. Some senior editors at the Globe took umbrage at the post, and it was pulled. Ingram urged that he explain to readers why the post was taken down, especially considering some people had already seen the post, and at least one blog had linked to it. [...]
Actually, it’s a great piece with some food for thought, and they would have been smart to keep it up there.
I’m also told now the author was site editor Peter Scowen.
Perhaps unwittingly, Scowen lays out some useful tips. Beyond that, his point must be taken. It’s a shame when headlines become bibliographies.
Most instructive that they pulled it. Great column of opinion and worth my time to read. Raises excellent points. The proof of MSM demise is in the pulling.
Snap! Who was that “hipster-doofus” journalism professor?
I think both sides make great arguments, and can’t there be a happy middle ground?
For example: can’t they have the title be “Book title by Author: A Review” and have a sub-title (visible upon click through) be something whimsical?
I also don’t see how this changes anything in the switch from the print version to the web version. I’m as likely to read an article based on the title in a newspaper as I am on the web version.
I’ve also always heard that the BBC is praised for their headlines, all of them too the point and factual.
Ian, I’ve written something at my Globe blog about the removal of Peter’s post, if you (or anyone else) wants to have a look. It’s here: http://tgam.ca/CH7
While the removal of posts is troublesome, there’s something both amusing and troubling about their aversion to SEO techniques.
I work for a trade publisher and we’ve been employing SEO techniques in our headline writing for a number of years. I agree, it can make for more factual/less exciting headlines. It does lead to a little less creativity; those witty headlines that the book guys were so proud of aren’t going to drive traffic.
SEO, however, is a necessary evil in the world of modern Web journalism. And the fact the Globe is just getting into this now, and that the reaction of the old-school print reporters is so visceral, seems to me emblematic of the challenges that the traditional “main-stream media” has a whole has faced adopting its business model to the Web world.
The book guys can either do SEO to get their traffic stats up and find readers, or they could find themselves without a book section one day soon as part of the latest cost-cutting measure because, surprise, readers aren’t finding them.
Some good points made in the now-deleted blog post. I have to say, I am a sucker for clever headlines.
scowen’s is one of the best pieces emanating from the globe in a while. and they spike it because a thin-skinned journo profs nose is out of joint or it doesn’t fit the brand image. yeesh. so much for transparency. “as long as we look transparent we’ll be fine.” clueless. the folks in charge do not understand even when they get it right.
Jeff, you just saved me a post. Well said.
(Web) article titles are metadata, not an opportunity to add a pithy flourish. If I didn’t know better I’d think the newspaper industry has something against the search engine biz…
The trouble with witty flourishes online, versus in the paper, is that they often appear in isolation. In a printed newspaper, you’d get a subhed, maybe an image of the book cover or the author, or a label overlining the “The marinating of the ancient rhymer” hed.
Without any of those additional cues, presented the way heds normally are on a webpage (whether it’s Google’s or the Globe’s) there’s simply no way to tell what the hell “The marinating of the ancient rhymer” is about. It doesn’t do what a hed needs to do. It’s not serving Google’s robots, but it’s also not serving human readers coming to the Globe to read interesting things about important books.
SEO’s new domination of the editorial sphere sticks in my craw, too. But the Globe’s hard-won lesson is one I will heed from now on.