Journalists must write for people — not search engines
If you need any more evidence that today’s journalism is a rudderless ship drifting about aimlessly, look no further than the reaction surrounding the recent decision to change the AP style for “Web site” to “website.” It amazed me to see the phrase “AP Stylebook” on Twitter’s trending topics, and as a former journalist who hasn’t quite washed the ink from his hands, I was curious.
My reaction to the news? So what? I yawned. I moved on.
And then I saw this. In a nutshell, Robert Niles of The Online Jounalism Review argues that journalism students need to ditch AP style and start learning SEO. Now my blood is boiling. Check out this idiocy:
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.
Today’s online publishers, editors and reporters need a new style that most effectively allows their words to reach their intended audiences. Unfortunately for them, the print-inspired AP style is not that. Today’s (and tomorrow’s) journalists need to learn search engine optimization [SEO] techniques as much as, if not more than their predecessors who worked the print industry needed to learn AP.
The argument is that AP style is for print; SEO is for online. And Niles argues journalists need to learn how to use SEO in their writing to help content “jump to the front of the line” in search engines. He says “good SEO can help make your pages more lucrative in keyword-targeted advertising systems, such as Google’s AdWords.” None of that has anything to do with journalism, and it absolutely shouldn’t. Ever.
AP style is an attempt to find a common, understandable language amongst members of the news industry. It sets rules so there’s a degree of sameness in language from one writer to the next. It allows for an authoritative voice that denotes a particular discipline. As such, it is extremely necessary. And not just for print. Even online, a website that doesn’t follow a consistent style is uncomfortable to read. Some readers may not pick up on why, but inconsistent capitalization, punctuation and language are disconcerting. AP style eliminates that.
As for Niles’ argument about SEO? It’s bunk.
A true journalist reports the truth, and should never never think of profit. Following Niles’ advice amounts to creating advertorial content. It’s slimy, dishonest and chips away at the pillars of what journalism should be.
One need look no further than Gizmodo’s recent series of stories about the next-gen iPhone to see why creating performance-based content is a bad thing. According to Gawker Media owner Nick Denton, Gizmodo reporters are paid “traffic bonuses” for their stories, and the reporters who broke the story about the next-gen iPhone stand to make a decent heap of cash for essentially buying property considered stolen under California law. That’s not good journalism. But it did quadruple the number of visitors to Gizmodo.
Reportage for the greater good and solid writing will get attention. And it’s worthwhile, even if it costs you.
As a young journalist, I investigated the trouble local pantries and soup kitchens had getting food donations from a large retailer (I won’t name the company, but it happens to be the largest retailer in the world). After the story ran, the retailer refused to sell the newspaper at the store. It cost the paper a considerable amount of money. But you know what else? Our local food pantries started getting donations. And due to customer demand, the paper was back on the racks there in a matter of a month.
Bottom line? Journalists need to write for people — not search engines. And if folks like Niles are the future of journalism, we’re in a lot of trouble.
The biggest problem I have with the SEO industry right now is that there are too many people who see a usability vs. SEO divide. There’s not. There are plenty of ways to write for people AND search engines at the same time.
The two things I tell writers they should consider giving up when writing with SEO in mind are:
(1) Clever headlines
(2) Long, soft ledes
The New York Times wasn’t near the top in Google News when Capt. Sullenburger landed a plane on the Hudson. Why? They went with the headline “Jet’s icy plunge.” Had they gone with something like “Plane lands on Hudson, everyone OK,” they probably would have been the number one result. Instead, some small news outlet in the Midwest beat the Freaking.New.York.Times on a story that happened in their own town.
Here’s the other thing: Writing for search engines is also writing for people. Here’s why. People want credible content, and there’s a lot of crap floating to the top of search engines these days. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was credible stuff at the top of search engines?
You can blame search engines for that, sure, but the fact is that people use search engines to find content, and will continue to do so.
Until we start balancing SEO and usability, we’re going to have an Internet cluttered with well-optimized crap and un-findable gold. And that ideal — great stuff, easily found — is only going to come when SEO professionals embrace usability AND when usability experts embrace SEO.
[Side note: If you're a company considering creating an SEO department, what you should do is hire one SEO and one usability pro, put their desks in the same office, and require any recommendations to get signoff from both of them.]
Thanks for commenting, Josh. The problem is you’re starting from an unproved premise, which is that it’s important to be at the top of the search results. I do not believe it’s important. In fact I know the importance of a good Google result is way overstated by SEOs. And you make my point pretty succinctly in your comment:
“People want credible content, and there’s a lot of crap floating to the top of search engines these days.” Exactly.
So…a paper in the midwest had the top Google result for the plane landing on the Hudson. So what? Know where I read the story? The New York Times. Know why? Because it’s a credible news source.
SEOs like to act like people just go to Google every time they want something. But in fact people (myself included) don’t need search to find what they’re looking for — especially breaking news. I learned about every major breaking news story this year from Twitter — not Google. And SEOs conveniently ignore the fact that some of the most-visited stories of the year didn’t get there because the were optimized for search engines, but rather because the were good, and were passed along, tweeted and retweeted, e-mailed and posted on blogs.
Need further proof? Google “buy a computer.” What’s your top result? Dell doesn’t show up until sixth. Best Buy doesn’t show up until ninth. But if you’re looking for a new computer, are you going to Google? Or are you going to dell.com?
Optimizing your stories for search engines doesn’t make them better stories. And the best stories are the ones people will want to read. Become a trusted news source by focusing on readers — not by fooling them into coming to your site.
Actually, the click stats are pretty crazy — the top result in Google gets about 40% of the clicks, the second result gets 20% of the clicks, and it goes down from there (when Google sees a trend deviation from that, they juggle the result).
You read the story in the Times because you know it’s a credible source. As someone with a fair bit of education PLUS a background in news, you’re not exactly the norm to measure this stuff by. Neither am I. I’m not likely to Google a national news story, I’m likely to go straight to boston.com nytimes.com.
But that totally discounts the hundreds of thousands to millions a day who *are* searching for these stories using Google or Bing or (god forbid) AOL.
But there’s a way to draw both savvy readers who head straight to your site (by being a reliably credible source) and the search crowd (by being smart about your SEO) without alienating either group. And those who do it best will get the lion’s share of both groups of readers.
Oh, and I totally agree with this:
“Become a trusted news source by focusing on readers — not by fooling them into coming to your site.”
It’s just not the reality. I would never take a job where they asked me to trick readers into coming for something that’s not there.
But I’ve seen people who actually go to Google and search for “www.yahoo.com” — you’d be really surprised how people surf the web.
Now stop it, Josh. You know you’re taking those stats completely out of context. Yes, the top results get the most clicks, but that doesn’t mean they get the most traffic. In fact, the best, most successful websites don’t have to count on traffic from search engines at all. That’s my point. Traffic at my workplace website is up more than 50 percent since I started, and it is purposely not optimized. In fact, I ignored every rule on purpose to prove that point. Why is traffic up, day in and day out? Because we use social networking to drive traffic, constantly update content and give people reasons to visit. Our traffic from search engines is under 25 percent…we’re a destination — not an accident.
Writers should not write to drive traffic, but to inform and entertain. Anything other than that and they’re playing to the old accusation: “You’re just trying to sell papers.” Readers see through it. It’s what started the rebellion against print, and it will start the rebellion against online. Definitely.
You may not remember Jenavi Kasper, but I do. Her little blog post exploded overnight. Not because of SEO, but because it was compelling. That’s where journalists need to be.
Frankly, saying a journalist should write their stories using keywords to generate traffic is indefensible.
No…I wouldn’t be surprised at how people surf the web. But what value are those types of users to your site? At that point they’re numbers and clicks…not informed people who make informed buying decisions. So if you’re looking at it from an eyeballs standpoint, and for selling advertising, your demographic information provided to potential advertisers is crap.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by danlovell: Journalists, please write for people, not search engines: http://bit.ly/cqsN6D (why teaching writers SEO will destroy journalism)…
So, two more points, then I’m done.
(1) By saying optimize and write for search engines, I’m not saying keyword stuff and trick people into getting to your site. I’m saying make your headline something people would search for if they were looking for a story (“Chile hit with another earthquake” vs “Shakin’ up the coast”), and get some information up front search engines can pass along to people (lead with “A 5.9 magnitude earthquake hit central Chile today, two months after a much larger 8.8 magnitude quake struck.” instead of “And now there’s more rubble. More piles to comb through. More people wondering where their relatives are.”)
I fail to see where that hurts readers. Sure, it bores a journalist who wants to be writing a little more creatively. But that’s the changing face of the business, and frankly, I don’t want to read the second type of story. I have Carlos Ruiz Zafon writing gorgeous novels for that.
(2) Remember that SEO for a site is only part of a company’s marketing campaign — news or not. Dell probably doesn’t care that it’s number 6 for buy a computer, because its target market is getting slammed with TV and magazine ads and sending people either directly to dell.com, or to the site via a search for “Dell computer,” not to mention in-store displays that have people buying Dell machines at Best Buy or wherever the cool kids are hanging out these days.
I think that you are completely right about the issue of journalists focusing on SEO over quality.
Search engines like Google are constantly refining their indexing methods to make them as organic and natural as possible. Gone are the days where meta tags determine rank. Now it’s based on much more. In some cases trying too hard can actually hurt you (like keyword stuffing your tags). The Google algorithm is smart enough to know when people are abusing the system.
Google is getting smarter, and I bet that in the future Google will be able to read/understand the content and base rankings on quality and not on title tags/keywords.
Also, as you guys mentioned, if a journalist stays true to his/her beliefs and interests, they will be able to build up a loyal reader base, which will bring more traffic, which will increase rank better than keywords.
I think Josh hit on a crucial point when he mentioned headlines like “Shakin’ up the coast” … For journalists, the best SEO principles work for people as well as machines, with the specifics of who, what, when, where. Good SEO principles are similar to good traditional headline-writing principles, but without the relentless need to save space. We can break the habit of using F-M in a headline if people are searching for Fayette-Manlius. Good SEO is better than much of the arcane journalese we used to see in print headlines, like “Tap man for post” or “Area man found missing” …
Most news sites have analytics that tell how much traffic Google sends their way. You’re right that drive-by traffic is less valuable, but you can produce advertising even for those folks. And Josh is right: Even many local people use Google as the way they find news.
I don’t think Google’s algorithms are well-suited for the news. They’re based on the slow accumulation of links from respected sources to a more-or-less static page. They were never designed to point you to the best source of a breaking story, which might be a small newspaper near the scene, not an Associated Press story on a site in Kansas City or India. I also think a lot of useless business directories come up more and more when you’re trying to find a local business’s website. And that’s supposed to be Google’s strength.
I think it’s interesting that Apple’s iPhones and iPads might do a lot to get people back in the habit of turning to trusted branded news sources, through apps, instead of the promiscuity of Googling a topic and clicking on whatever looks like it might be what you want.
Also, did you know that if you Google asciidan, Google suggests ascidian, which is a sea squirt?
I should have written “Fayetteville-Manlius” above, or no one’s ever going to find it.
You’re not really addressing the point here, Josh, which is whether it’s more important for a journalist to learn AP style or SEO. I don’t think there’s an excuse for writing “Shakin’ up the coast” as a headline — but it’s just a bad headline. In a world of readers who scan for information, it’s not informative and doesn’t say what the stories about. Journalists (more rightly headline writers) need to write informative headlines. I agree that ledes should also be informative — but again, that’s good writing. Frankly, I don’t care how a search engine reacts.
As for your second point, you needn’t remind me that there’s more to marketing than SEO. I’ve made that point repeatedly on this blog. And I go a step further. I believe the importance of SEO is way overblown — a myth perpetrated by people who just want to take money from those who don’t know better.
Great points, Keith. I’ll add that Google recently announced that load time will now become part of the algorithm. Popularity is also part of the algorithm. Good journalism leads to loyal readers. Loyal readers are good customers. It’s a simple formula.
Thanks for coming by, Brian. First, I’ll say that I’ve always hated the “Tap man for post” headlines. One of the things I love about The Onion is the way those headlines are ridiculed. And I think good headline writing isn’t about SEO at all, but about being informative. Newspapers really lost their way on that years ago. I also agree that Google isn’t well suited for directing people to news — especially not local news. But studies show consistently that most people visit newspaper websites for local news. So why play to the search engines? If you’re trying to get local people to visit your website, advertise. Make the site a destination by creating top-of-mind awareness. Make sure local people think of your site when they want to know what’s happening.
Secondly, there’s no argument you can offer that drive-by traffic has any worth at all — especially on a local news website. Someone in Indiana who’s brought to a news site in Syracuse to read about the plane landing on the Hudson is not helping you at all. In fact, it’s probably hurting you, because it artificially inflates the number of potential customers your advertisers believe they’re reaching on your site.
I think you’re absolutely right about the iPad and such. Branded apps will be transformative, and will make SEO even less important.
Yeah…I’ve only had this domain for a year. Outside of the normal WordPress stuff that’s built in, I don’t do any SEO. But regardless what Google suggests, the results on the front page are all me.
Dan,
I guess I’m just not clear on why journalists can only either learn AP Style or SEO writing. Seriously, people’s brains are big enough for both, and really, good SEO writing is a couple of basic rules, until you get to the black hat trickery that you seem to think is all SEOs do.
I think good SEO comes naturally to smart people without them even considering it. If you were writing this piece for a print paper, you may have used a headline like “Journos, forget SEO” to make it a two-column, single-deck hed. But you have space, and you spelled out journalists and search engines. Ta-da! SEO writing. When newspapers started on the web, they weren’t doing that — they were simply shoveling the print headline and print story to the site. Now they’re recognizing the need for stuff like web-friendly headlines and findable copy.
And AP is recognizing that, too — they recently made a change from Web site to website; the second is searched so much more frequently than the first.
The fact that fewer people are reading newspapers and the 1940s and days of 52% profit lines are gone, means there has to be some evolution in the industry. I’m certain you and I are in agreement that what’s important here is that journalists deliver strong news content in a manner that is readable and effective. I just find there is a need for pulling in one-time reader traffic to keep page views — and, it follows, ad revenue — up for the online side, and that’s where using some basic SEO, like good headlines and ledes, comes in.
Form follows function, Josh. It’s a pretty simple equation. Are you writing to inform people or drive traffic? Driving traffic is a function of the marketing department — not journalists. It’s extremely dangerous to put journalists in that position (as I showed in the blog post, it makes for bad, sometimes unethical, journalism). Once we start down that path, there’s no turning back.
Secondly, what argument can you possibly put forth that one-time visits are good for anyone? They aren’t good for advertisers and they are good for newspaper sites in the long term. They’re bad for advertisers because (especially if they’re out-of-towners) they artificially inflate numbers with visitors who won’t buy local products anyway. And they’ll hurt newspapers because they artificially inflate the expectations of advertisers. When they don’t get results, they won’t buy ads from you. That’s just plain logic. Not only that, but I’ve seen it in practice.
The SEO crowd loves numbers. I don’t. I’ve seen newspapers and websites fall all over themselves to get numbers for years now, and it hasn’t helped. It’s not numbers that count; it’s loyalty. You don’t get loyal readers by making marketers of your journalists. You don’t get loyal readers by pandering to an algorithm. You get loyal readers by being damned good at what you do.
Do you have any proof the AP adopted “website” for SEO purposes? Cuz I bet that’s not it. AP recognizes the changing language. And I don’t think Web site was ever the popular spelling.
Dan, you seem to be under the impression that news is separate from the delivery vehicle (let’s say a newspaper). It’s an ideal that, sad to say, I’ve given up on. It would be great if journalism could thrive because it’s good journalism. It can’t. The marketing department has a product to sell, and when the product isn’t selling, you need to refine the product to match the market.
Journalists are getting laid off and newspapers are closing. This isn’t happening (for the most part) because they’re not producing good journalism, it’s happening because they’re still trying to reach a market that no longer exists. The newspaper model hasn’t changed in many years. Newspapers have simply cut size and changed their layout to try to maintain their bottom lines, and it’s not working.
Newspapers can seek primarily loyal readers, but whatever they’re doing isn’t working. You can’t keep the lights on and the presses running by appealing to a small group of loyal readers; you need to have a larger group of people buying, even if a large portion of that group is ephemeral.
One of the reasons it didn’t matter to me that I was leaving the industry — and I probably would have gone after the right offer anywhere — is that I’d come in with that change-the-world ideal that many young journalists have, and I gave up on newspapers being able to provide that and still be able to pay the bills.
Brian C asked me in a Q&A if I read the paper, and I answered as delicately as I could that no, I don’t, because it doesn’t give me enough. What I didn’t say is I can’t justify 75 cents and more paper to recycle for a 10-minute read. I would be one of those loyal readers if the market would support a product full of people being damned good at journalism. But at the moment, it doesn’t.
No, I don’t have “proof” that the AP adopted website for SEO. Their press release on the new edition said it was due to “customer demand.” I think it’s reasonable to guess that SEO was one of a bunch of factors driving that customer demand. I’m guessing in the next three to five years, we’re going to see the AP move to postal abbreviations for states, as well.
Ignoring the “rules” of the web, including SEO, is the offline equivalent of just dropping newspaper boxes everywhere and stocking them equally. But we don’t do that. We put them in high-traffic areas where people are likely to buy them: outside of diners and convenience stores instead of in the middle of public parks and on the tops of trees in people’s yards. The difference is, the rules of the web, for better or worse, include content in a way that offline marketing doesn’t.
The problem many news organizations run into is that when they hire SEOs is that they hire SEOs with no usability experience and no news background, and then they listen to those SEOs blindly. Seriously, it makes me want to punch babies. And publishers.
The larger overall argument here — and this is just a facet of it — is, is it more important to produce good journalism, or for newspapers to be able to pay the bills? Because in the current climate, the first is not leading to the second.
Dan, what you’ve done here is create a dichotomy between SEO optimized articles and good journalism where none actually exists. Following the rules Josh mentioned earlier, giving up clever headlines and long, soft ledes, doesn’t change the quality of the entire piece. It can still be a well-written, well-researched, informative article, and be completely SEO optimized. For a news site that is not location-specific like Slate, Salon, or HuffPo, all your arguments against artificially inflated advertising numbers go out the window because the site has no obvious local readership (syracuse readers going to syracuse.com) and must instead try to attract readers through marketing and discovery, a large part of which is search results. It must then depend on the quality of it’s overall product to create loyalty and build readership. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched for something and ended up finding an extremely useful and informative website that I return to time and time again.
You right, Josh. Newspapers are in a death spiral. And this “whatever they’re doing” to attract loyal readers isn’t working. But what is this “whatever?” Our hometown paper is slimmer, the stories are poorly written and sourced, and there’s still a huge reliance on wire copy from day to day. This is the big effort you’re talking about? The one that leads to “okay, now we’d better ‘optimize’ our stories to get more traffic…and stuff in a Burger King reference so a fast food ad will run with the story.”? Seriously?
You’re also right that I’m an idealist. As I wrote here, I left the industry precisely because the industry — and the people in it — don’t recognize the privilege they have. And as such, they produce sub-standard content — content that does not meet the needs of the community. That’s why there’s a death spiral. That’s why people started turning to the Internet in the first place.
Your argument, by extension, means journalists should do whatever they can to ensure they can pay the bills. So why not buy your stories? Why not make them up entirely? If it sells paper or drives traffic, it works in Josh’s vision of “journalism,” right? Well, not mine.
BTW, the lack of traffic isn’t keeping newspapers from making money from online advertising. Just the idea that more traffic needs to be sent to newspaper websites is specious at best. The reason newspapers can’t make money online is that they undervalued online ads from the beginning. To prop up the print ads, they sold against online ads…they made sure advertisers knew the value was in print and not online. Kinda hard to change your advertisers’ minds after you convinced them the first time.
I do think SEO principles sometimes come across as if they were made by engineers and numbers people instead of wordsmiths. We always tell the newsroom to use them sensibly and don’t take them to extremes. And really, I can’t think of any examples of a headline that was obviously written for SEO that failed for the reader. It’s more often the other way around. A vague headline doesn’t work for either.
As far as driving traffic goes, if someone from Indiana is searching for Syracuse basketball, you can advertise Syracuse tickets to them. Heck, you can advertise Indiana tickets to them. (But they won’t find it if the headline says SU instead of Syracuse.) But Dan is right, the prime business is loyal local customers for local businesses.
I’ve just never seen SEO as all that different from what we want staffers to do anyway. Write an informative, to-the-point headline that gets people to read your story. SEO is just a different set of style points, and considering how arcane some newspaper style points are, it might actually be an improvement.
Thanks for coming by and taking the time to comment, Frank. To be clear, I didn’t set up this dichotomy; Mr. Niles did that. A well-written article will include the who, what, when, where, why and how anyway…so if this is all we’re talking about, why do we need to talk about it at all? The reason is because Mr. Niles suggests writers use keywords to make pages more lucrative. That’s appalling. A writer should not spend his time wondering what ads Google might put alongside his story.
For the second part of your comment…I’m specifically talking about newspaper websites here. The vast majority of American journalists are working for local news organizations. I do think different rules apply to national and international organizations, but I believe those cases, advertising is way more important than SEO. I can tell you precisely how many times I’ve searched for something and returned to a site time and time again: zero. If your site isn’t a destination for me, reading one decent story there isn’t going to change that.
Thanks, Brian. The search part of this argument has gotten all the ink, but the part that burned me most was about ensuring the use of keywords to properly match advertising. That just can’t be a journalist’s place.
I’m not arguing that journalists shouldn’t write clear, informative headlines…that’s a straw man Josh set up. I’m arguing that journalists shouldn’t be in the business of selling newspapers or placing advertising, and that’s what the article I responded to suggests. Can you sell tickets to someone in Indiana? Theoretically. Will you? No. Not enough to warrant the effort.
If a story is about Fayetteville, should Fayetteville be mentioned in the story? Of course it should. Not because a search engine won’t pick it up, but because it’s good journalism. Do it because it’s good journalism. If it’s good for a search engine, so be it. But I think the intent is important. There are a million things you can do to trick a search engine to get crappy content to the top of the results. As journalists, let’s concentrate on the million things we can do to serve our communities the best we can.