Spalpeen

Give everyone at the company unrestricted access to detailed traffic information. Simple as that.

Give them everything that sitemeter tells me about this site, and more! Graphs, charts, pie charts, 3D graphics. Everything. Every journalist, producer, editor, assistant, janitor(!) should know exactly how people are reading their website, and how they got there. It’s the only way to train people how to use SEO (advisors and consultants often have a background of spam, so you don’t want them anywhere near your precious brand).

This came from an article about whether or not SEOs and Journalists can get along. If the answer is no, then the whole journalism industry is fucked. Seriously, they might as well go and learn carpentry. If journalists can’t figure out SEO, then there is literally no hope for them or their employers. Fortunately, there’s a whole mini-industry developing where people do know how to do SEO properly. Just check out any site from Gawker or Weblogs, Inc. to see how to effectively work with search engines.

Oh and by the way, any sense of nostalgia or pride that journalists have about the way they write is fluff. A common argument is “oh I can’t write this way because it sounds like I’m writing for a robot.” Here’s a surprise: you are. But the reality is that I’d take a rigid, descriptive headline over the pun-filled crap that most tabloids write anyday. It’s about time the focus shifted towards descriptions of fact, and away from boring and repetitive puns. The skill of headline writing has changed. Get over it.

That’s not to say you don’t have to write for human readers. Here I’m quoting an email from Vladimir Cole, editor of Joystiq.com when he sent in 2005.

In this age of RSS syndication and cross-syndication, writing good headlines is very, very important. Headlines either draw or repulse readers.

Here’s a bit of text on headlines from a book I’ve had on my shelf for about 8 years…. (finally had occasion to open it!)

Editors who cannot let an ineffective headline see print may drive staff bananas, but there is a method to their madness: The best story in the world is worthless if no one reads it. Media with staff who specialize in head writing are fortunate. Some publications—such as a tabloid out of Florida—will pay a headline writer obscene sums of money because they know how heads affect readership. But in small editorial operations [that’s us!], almost every staffer has a shot at writing heads and must internalize two basic rules or live with rewrites. A headline must:

1. Let the reader know how the story differs from previous stories on similar topics; and
2. Pique the reader’s interest anew.

WEST SIDE FIRE KILLS FIVE piques only a sense of déjà vu. [The Joystiq equivalent would be NINTENDO REVOLUTION CONTROLLER DESIGN LEAK?] FIVE DIE AS SMOKE DETECTOR FAILS does the job if the smoke-detector angle is new. If not, the writer must dig deeper into the particulars or reach for some kind of device to stir interest. “FOOLPROOF” INSULATOR MELTS; FIVE DIE IN FLAMES, or “BARGAIN” SMOKE DETECTOR BLAMED IN DEATH OF FIVE and so on. The challenge to write fresh headlines is perhaps greatest in trade publications [like Joystiq!!], covering the same narrow subject in issue after issue.

Hope he doesn’t mind.

Also, here’s an article from 2006 in the New York Times about writing for search engines. This isn’t new information. We’ve known for half a decade that you had to write for search engines to be successful online. It’s time journalists realised this!

On the topic of being first, there’s the case of the DS Lite announcement in 2006. Joystiq was the first blog to report on Nintendo’s DS Lite announcement. The result was maybe two or three immediate incoming links from blogs. Not very significant. It turns out that that’s not what’s important. What’s centrally important is that we were the first to be indexed by Google to use the terms: “nintendo ds lite” Three months later, we were still number one in Google for that term (several links higher than a greatly better funded website, IGN). Google gives much higher weight to sites that have the news first. That suggested that we focus on speed when blogging items, which is the reality of the situation with blogs like Engadget and Joystiq.

Oh and by the way, if you copy me and start using blockquote code in your article, you’re a bad SEO! Blockquotes suck for SEO, because Google thinks they’re not original content (and they’re generally not, because you’re quoting a huge section of someone else’s work). In this case, I get away with it because I’m quoting an internal email that Google has never seen before. You should know this!