In the hearts of many newsman and woman lies a profound respect for a certain entity, the sublime sanctity of which has been enforced by centuries of hard-nosed proof-readers and dogmatic sub-editors. Since the first printed newspapers roughly a half century after the advent of the printing press in the mid 1400s [Johannes Weber (2006), Strassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in Europe”, German History 24 (3): 387-412 (387)], professional structures in journalism production have evolved to foster attention to detail in the matters of spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, mechanics and typography - in short, to ensure that writers follow house style. Journalists have learned to love and to cherish the part of their role that, for the benefit of society, has kept the written word pristine and effective in the names of clarity, consistency and professionalism.

“The newspaper industry developed a common style, maintained by the Associated Press, to meet the communication needs of a print-based industry trying to most effectively communicate with a broad audience,” says Robert Niles, long-time news site builder and founding editor of the award-winning service journalism website ThemeParkInsider.com. [Robert Niles, (April 21, 2010) http://www.ojr.org/, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/201004/1843/, April 21, 2012]. The system seemed to work well.

Then one day in April 2010, a strange thing happened on a strange website called Twitter. The phrase ‘AP Stylebook’ hit the social networking and microblogging platform’s Trending Topics list after the news organisation announced it was changing its house style from ‘web site’ to ‘website’. [@APStylebook, (April 16, 2010) https://twitter.com/, http://twitter.com/#!/APStylebook/status/12296505018, April 21, 2012].

As with many debates whose central issue is reducible enough to accommodate Tweet-length weigh-ins and that have the popular appeal to make it onto Twitter’s Trending list, much of the discussion around the AP’s shift fell into the realm of pro - con commentary. “Everyone but me is cheering AP style change to website,” tweeted University of Florida journalism lecturer Mindy McAdams. “I think it resembles parasite.” [Mindy McAdams, (April 16, 2010) http://www.twylah.com/, http://www.twylah.com/macloo/tweets/12302712045, April 21, 2012].

After several days of the kind of digital discussion that sprawls from its inciting incident (in this case, the AP’s style change) to broader debates about what things mean in wider contexts, Niles published a blog post presenting his own take on the issue at hand. For Niles, the AP’s decision wasn’t about tradition or aesthetics, or really even about style in the sense that anyone but the most meticulous of copy-readers understands the word.

”If you’re publishing online, Google style (i.e. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)) always trumps AP style,” was one of Niles’ tweeted conclusions. Another was: “J-schools need to ditch AP style and start teaching their students SEO instead. More valuable to their careers.” [Robert Niles, (April 21, 2010) Online Journalism Review, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/201004/1843/, April 21, 2012].

What has changed in the world of journalism in recent years to allow Niles even the luxury of considering such a drastic abandon of the industry’s time-honoured stylistic standard? The short answer is that as the dominant media in which journalism is consumed changes from atom-based to bit-based, other things - like how readers find and consume news items and the nature of readers’ relationships to publications - changes as well.

Attention to SEO is, for example, helping writers and editors ensure their words reach the people for whom they’re written and intended. “SEO provides the key to reaching an audience not motivated by existing print brands, including younger readers and readers outside a publication’s traditional search area - folks who might not know to seek out a newspaper website, but who would nevertheless be interested in its content.” [Robert Niles, (April 21, 2010) Online Journalism Review, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/201004/1843/, April 21, 2012].

Just as the bygone world of print-only journalism had its own techniques for increasing readership day-to-day (front page story, image and headline selection, supplements, giveaways, special offers), SEO offers digital publishers meaningful opportunities to increase the visibility of their product and to expand and retain audience in today’s search-driven media landscape: “Even as Facebook and social media provide an increasing share of referrals to online news sites, search engines still provide the initial point of entry for millions of new visitors to websites each day. If there are techniques that allow you to jump to the front of the line, to attract more of those potential readers, you need to be using them.” [Robert Niles, (April 21, 2010) Online Journalism Review, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/201004/1843/, April 21, 2012].

The Daily Telegraph’s community manager Shane Richmond puts it another way: “The concept is simple. It’s about ensuring that your content is found by the millions of people everyday who use search engines as their first filter for news and those who don’t search at all but trust an automated aggregator, such as Google News, to filter stories for them. These people are essentially asking a computer to tell them the news. If you want your story to be read, you’d better make sure the computer knows what you’re writing about.” [Shane Richmond, (from British Journalism Review Vol 19, No 4, 2008) British Journalism Review, http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2008/no4_richmond, April 21, 2012].

Moreover, the segment of the commercial online journalism sector looking to fund itself through digital display advertising is currently all but dependent on tactical SEO. “Good SEO can help make your pages more lucrative in keyword-targeted advertising systems, such as Google’s AdWords. Sloppy SEO leads to poorly matched ads, lower click-through rates and less money per click or impression,” says Niles. “If you need new readers to make money, then SEO will help you more than AP style.” [Robert Niles, (April 21, 2010)Online Journalism Review, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/201004/1843/, April 21, 2012].

Of course, the dichotomy of AP and other house styles versus SEO is a false one - brought into existence by Niles and others in the heat of an industry debate as a tool to re-angle news analysis so it fits tidily into the “old versus new” narrative paradigm with which most readers are comfortable. Digital newsrooms today continue to maintain and respect house style guides while educating editorial staff-members on best SEO practice and hiring SEO editors whose jobs frequently entail manipulating content and page furniture to optimise for search engines.

Still, some degree of SEO skepticism on the part of established journalism-industry professionals is understandable. The AP Stylebook is so-labelled because it started out as a book; and even though it’s now been digitised, can be updated instantly and is responsive to reader feedback and recommendations, http://www.apstylebook.com is still a relatively static, slow-moving set of guidelines - which is one source of why it functions beautifully as reference material.

But pinning down best SEO practice is different. “Search companies don’t want their techniques to be stolen by rivals or exploited by publishers seeking to gain an unfair advantage. As a result, the rules of SEO are constantly changing as search engines refine their techniques both to improve results and to close loopholes. There are lots of factors at play in SEO.” [Shane Richmond, (from British Journalism Review Vol 19, No 4, 2008) British Journalism Review, http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2008/no4_richmond, April 21, 2012]

Imagine coming from a world in which style reference material was written down, didn’t change often and was completely transparent. Now imagine someone tells you the new rules can be found in no one central place, depend on whims of companies (in this case, search engine developers) that have nothing to do with the core product you’re selling (in this case, news content) and change constantly based on factors you’re not allowed to know with any precision.

Another, perhaps more rigorous source of resistance to SEO comes from perceptions about editorial practice and priorities. “For many print journalists such tinkering amounts to butchery, and the insistence on keywords renders copy dry and formulaic. On top of this there’s a resistance,” says The Telegraph’s communities editor Shane Richmond, “to the idea that we are somehow reduced to writing for computers rather than for people.” [Shane Richmond, (from British Journalism Review Vol 19, No 4, 2008) British Journalism Review, http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2008/no4_richmond, April 21, 2012].

Just as there is truth in this statement, there are a number of arguments and nuances to assuage concerns. First of all SEO practice changes almost constantly because the the scope of digital content is constantly expanding and the algorithms that determine the order of results for search terms are being tweaked regularly as well.  Why do they change? According to Niles, “to better serve the needs of their users”. [Robert Niles, (April 21, 2010) Online Journalism Review, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/201004/1843/, April 21, 2012].

Secondly, “there has always been a certain formula to journalism: focusing on the five Ws - who? what? why? when? and where? - that underpin any good story; writing an article so it can be cut from the bottom; working with the constraints of the publication’s style book -” and SEO can in fact be seen as a tool for strengthening some of these and for adapting and advancing others, notes Richmond. “A keyword-rich story will get names and places in prominent positions and will do so early in the copy. Just as clever headlines, delayed drops and other journalistic tricks evolved to suit the medium, so we will learn new ways to take advantage of the opportunities SEO provides to reach a vast audience.” [Shane Richmond, (from British Journalism Review Vol 19, No 4, 2008) British Journalism Review, http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2008/no4_richmond, April 21, 2012].

Another aspect of SEO that makes some journalists uncomfortable is something Charlie Brooker suggested in his 2008 Guardian column, namely that writing with search in mind obliges journalists to think along the lines of memetic buzzwords and hyped phrases: “Your modern journalist is expected […] to shoehorn all manner of hot phraseology into copy […] to con people into reading it.” [Charlie Brooker, (July 21, 2008) The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/21/charliebrooker.pressandpublishing, April 21, 2012]. While this view holds some superficial logic, and indeed sway over some newsrooms, it ignores one of the more central principles that make search engines such widely useful entities - they establish industry-wide conventions about relevance and timeliness. “An irrelevant keyword does you no good at all and in some instances might be harmful.” [Shane Richmond, (from British Journalism Review Vol 19, No 4, 2008) British Journalism Review, http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2008/no4_richmond, April 21, 2012].

The scope of these concerns though is limited compared to what I believe is the larger issue at hand: how do we live and do business in a world driven more than ever before by the collection, analysis and re-distribution of data? In the case of SEO, it’s a question of data pertaining to interest and topics - that is, what topics (in this case, search terms) are how many people looking for right now?

But “once we know what people are searching for should we write stories to meet that demand?” asks Richmond. “Will search engines end up dictating our news agenda as well as the way we format our stories? If we write stories simply to chase traffic, where do we find the resources to write the specialist stories, the ones that are important to our core readers but not massively popular?” [Shane Richmond, (from British Journalism Review Vol 19, No 4, 2008) British Journalism Review, http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2008/no4_richmond, April 21, 2012].

Richmond’s answer is that these are editorial and not SEO questions. He writes that “there is nothing to debate when it comes to SEO”, that SEO is “value-neutral” and that “giving readers what they want is a sensible strategy, even though the overall mix of stories within a publication has to be balanced.”

”If an editor wants to devote resources to writing stories based on topics people are searching for, they now have the data that will permit them to do so.” The phasing here is key as in it lies the primary motivation for the research undertaken in this study.

The world today is filled with information far beyond the scope of search engine data for news sites. Digital media and the Internet in particular allows much of that data to be collected, organised, analysed and distributed in formats as arcane as binary code to media as polished as an advertising brochure. Accordingly, industries everywhere are beginning to look at how to use some of that data to increase efficiency, satisfy customers and for dozens of other purposes.

What are those purposes and how are they achieved in digital journalism today? Such is the question from which this research stems.
How do we collect, analyse, repurpose and then distribute data about the editorial and business of journalism?
And crucially, what are the effects of this process on journalistic output?

“Once we know what people are searching for should we write stories to meet that demand? Will search engines end up dictating our news agenda as well as the way we format our stories? If we write stories simply to chase traffic, where do we find the resources to write the specialist stories, the ones that are important to our core readers but not massively popular? // All those concerns are legitimate, but they are not questions about SEO and shouldn’t be interpreted as such. They are editorial questions. If an editor wants to devote resources to writing stories based on topics people are searching for, they now have the data that will permit them to do so. Giving readers what they want is a sensible strategy, even though the overall mix of stories within a publication has to be balanced. Different editors will make different choices, but they are editorial choices, not SEO choices. SEO is value-neutral. It doesn’t require you to dumb down, to fill your stories with the names of celebrities or to write 500 articles about Viagra every month. Even if you write about badgers, thermal dynamics or parachuting you will want your article to be seen by people who care about those topics. SEO techniques will give your article a better chance of being found.”

[source : http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2008/no4_richmond ]

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