The Blog
Rarely updated now, used during Journalism MA at the University of Sheffield.
This week at the Guardian former PC Zone Editor and TV critic turned usually funny ranter Charlie Brooker penned a little rant against agressive online news marketing.To my mind he's a little off the mark. Brooker suggests that news websites are dropping popular online search terms into stories just to build hits and advertising revenue.
Sure he's being deliberatly absurd when he drops BRITNEY and POKER into his headlines, but he never calms down enough to make a rational point or provide a single real example.
He suggests that popular but irrelevant terms are inserted into stories to make the stories rank higher on search engines. Personally I've never seen any example of this at the Telegraph. It's nonsense. Putting random words like Britney into an unrelated headline would distract the search engines and bury your story behind a mass of existing Britney content. And if readers did end up there they'd be quickly disapointed, which is fatal for free media which relies on it's reputation. So if you tried Brookers tricks you'd quickly find both search engines and users ignoring you.
The practice he's really aiming at but doesn't seem to understand it the dark art of Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is about making your story easy for interested readers to find; it's about being clear and explicit about your content so it can be easily located.
Online headlines on website news stories are read by machines, not people. The headline people read is the link that takes them there. It's the search engines which give priority to the page headlines and so yes, they are dull and descriptive. And descriptive means using the words a reader might associate with the story. If it's about Obama then you write "Barack Obama", you add "US Elections" to clarify the context and you outline the issue in the obvious language. This has always been the way because web users like to identify content rapidly and all good sites help them do this. Confusing newspaper headlines with puns that take a moment to register are no use online.
As for Brooker's suggestion that writers control the positioning of words on the page in an F shape; this is the sign of a chap who doesn't venture into the newsroom much. Writers rarely have any control over the published layout of their copy and thus little control over what words appear on what line. It'd be nice if they could, and I'm sure the F shape theory is true, but in practice it doesn't happen.
What is true is that writing should be diferent online from newspapers. I believe Amazon once calculated that users spend only 4 seconds on any given web page. The writer then has 4 seconds, or just a couple of lines, to impart the most vital information to satisfy the reader. Many users don't even read in chunks online. Studies that track eye movements show most users are able to rapidly scan for details and answers to their questions without reading whole paragraphs.
Writing should be tailored differently for the web to take into acount new forms of reading. There are dangers to the accurate and impartial ideals of journalism and I have a number of reservations about online news practice, but Brooker doesn't really pick up on them.
For anyone who hadn't noticed, the Telegraph.co.uk has just overtaken the Guardian as the UK's most popular national newspaper website.It's a close run thing at the top of the
charts, with the
Daily Mail online also making big gains. All three sites now sit around the 18 million monthly users mark. Most impressivly that means the Telegraph has added around 7 million readers in the last year. The Guardian has in fact dropped by about 1% whilst the Mail is seeing healthy growth.
Telegraph Communities editor Shane Richmond is predicting the lead will swap around a little in the near future, but it's clear the Telegraph's made a big jump.
It doesn't seem like the Guardian has taken this very well. Back in April Guardian Media writer Jemima Kiss wrote about how the Telegraph.co.uk was growing fast by boosting page download speeds, producing more content and improving it's search rankings.
Now they've been overtaken they're complaining, and together with the Mail and the Times have called for a review of the way website traffic is calculated. I don't know what will come of it, but the timing smacks of sour grapes. It's no crime to improve your product and market it better. And this is a growing market, not a limited number of users to be won away from rivals.
Methods of measuring website traffic are vague at best and nobody can quite agree what exactly should be counted. Is it better for twenty people to read one story, or one loyal reader to read twenty?
Perhaps it's really up to the advertisers to judge sucess as that's where the money comes from, not the readers. But then are their adverts simple brand awareness exercises, or do they expect readers to click through and buy products. How do they measure sucess?
Maybe it's just the news demand that's shifted market share. As the credit crunch hits, readers are drawn away from the Gurdian's liberal worldwide focus and pay more attention to the Telegraph's sharp domestic business news.
Politically too the wind has shifted away from the Guardian as Labour slump and Conservative media is boosted.
Now the other interesting piece of news this week was the BBC website's massive overspend. All the news traffic they pull in hurts the newspaper websites, and if they face cuts it could boost the newspaper sites again.
So in the bleak newspaper market, at least the websites are looking the picture of good health.
The assistant editor of the Guardian in a chat about blogs:
"The shorter it is, the more likely the buggers are to read it."
That's all.
One of the nicest things about the BBC News website is that it links off to rival news coverage on each story. This provides a great snapshot of how the news is being treated across the English language media.You can also get this service from news aggregators such as Google News, but the BBC, presumably thanks to the unique way it's funded, is the only news publisher to do this, highlighting their competition.
It's a seemingly selfless act, but probably only increases the BBC's reputation rather than loosing them audience. Now the world has switched to tabbed browsing, linking out doesn't automatically take your audience away like it used to when we only had one page open per browser.
The news aggregator shows how different media outlets choose to spin the same stories. A great example is today’s story about a confrontation between US and Iranian naval forces.
As the story was initially sourced only from a US Navy press briefing, we can assume that all media outlets were reporting the exact same details. Clearly the story will rapidly develop as the media starts to make it's own inquiries, but for the first hour of such a story, everyone is working from the same information, and nobody can afford not to rush a report online. The BBC sidebar then provides an overview of the latest headlines used to describe these events.
There are some neat little variations on the story appearing.
The Guardian initially ran with "US 'almost opened fire' on Iranian ships". Having just read the story on the BBC, this headline seemed a little twisted against the US. It ignores the provocation crucial to the events, and 'Iranian ships' is a poor, potentially misleading, description of military speedboats.
An hour later they had re-run the story with "US ships 'threatened' by Iranian boats", presumably after having now taken the time to read the details off CNN a little more closely.
I guess the nice thing is that the Guardian leave the old version online, for transparencies sake, even if they don't actually link to it anymore. Also, re-publishing rather than editing the first story pushes them back to the top of the news aggregator feeds, which probably helps draw audience.
If you go to the Fox News homepage (They report, you decide!), you get the headline, "U.S. to Iran: Don't Mess With Us". Clearly those who head straight to Fox for their news like an agressive take on events. I took a picture for posterity - they don't archive the front page.
The headline actually on the story, and the one linked to by the BBC and the outside world, reads "U.S. Warns Iran Against 'Provocative Actions' Following Incident in Strait of Hormuz". It's a more reasonable headline to send out to the rest of the world.
Would it be cynical to suggest that most of their audience has no idea where the Strait of Hormuz is, but that it makes FOX sound knowledgeable and serious? I suspect so, especially given that since I started writing, they edited the story to include a huge map at the top pointing out the strait in big letters. Unlike the Guardian, Fox News doesn't seem to keep older versions of a story online.
Naming the straights in the headline is a detail which isn't needed for the benefit of the story, but for the benefit of the media organisation publishing. Scanning the news aggregators, only The Times, Murdoch's local outlet, also bothers to put this geographical detail in the headline.
The gulf between the political ideologies of the Guardian and Fox News won't surprise anyone, but the presence of such differently weighted headlines side by side does a great deal to foster impartiality. Aggregating the headlines helps us see exactly how news is being reported and spun, reminds us of the varied interpretations of facts possible, and shows us a spectrum of opinion. It's very useful.
Edit: You can watch the Iranian boat barney here.
Edit 2: Zany Iranians now claim the video is a 'clumsy fake'.
