The Blog
Rarely updated now, used during Journalism MA at the University of Sheffield.
Useful SEO tools, links and resources for journalists, to go with my talk on SEO to journalism students at the University of Sheffield.Basic SEO reminder: - Describe your content with strong keywords.
- Get related sites to link to you.
- Make sure internal and external link text uses appropriate keywords.
Google> Auto suggest & related searches provide keyword tips
Google Insights> Compare terms to find the most useful keywords
Google Adwords Keyword tool> Recent search volume information
Google SEO starter guide (pdf)> SEO guide from those in the know
SEOMoz Search Ranking Factors study> Thorough analysis of the relative weights of different factors in search
Open Site Explorer or
Yahoo Site Explorer> Allow you to explore inbound link structures
10 ways journalists can conquer SEO> Great set of useful tips
Google Living Stories> Better ways of surfacing information.
SphinnSEo and Social Media aggregator - excelent source of news and tips
Vernon Kay denies death rumors Such an awful story in so many ways.
According to ITN/MSN News/Yahoo, people who edit Wikipedia pages are "Hackers".
The Buckinghamshire advertiser has an
even worse write-up of the same crap.
I'm astonished any journalist out there doesn't know how Wikipedia works. Anyone can edit with a single click. This doth not a "Hacker" make. Pathetic. Massive fail ITN and everyone who posted the story or got their pet gibbon to mash out an ignorant re-write.
Wise man once say: "If a dog bites a man it is sad for man, but not a story. But if a man he bites a dog, then this is news!"
Spotted in Friday's Telegraph.
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.
Did you know there are two types of quote mark on computers? I didn't until a few months ago when I arrived at the Telegraph and was sent on a search and destroy mission for the wrong sort.
It's so irritating I wanted to share.
It seems there are both curley and straight quote marks in the world, even within each font.
We have the curled: “ ”
And the straight: " "
When you type you'll probably only use the straight ones. But if you copy and paste something from a document, you could find yourself copying the curley ones. Even if they look exactly the same in whatever you're typing - they won't when you publish.
Mixing them up is just madness.
So don't you let anyone try to tell you you don't need specalist elite training to be a Web Journalist.
I'd just like to take a moment to post a response to some of the accusations thrown out in Rhoda’s awards blog post.She's getting a bit of an
official reputation for
libel and inaccuracy this week.
Eight of us made the trip for the awards: David, Marie, a rep from each post-grad course and a single hanger on.
We rose early for the train to London where we were unfortunately placed in the quiet carriage. This went so badly that one gentleman put earplugs in while Broadcast girls discussed midget sex-tapes. Peter Cole travelled separately in a pink stretch Hummer.
David's comment about our lack of newspapers and the death of Print media was well founded. Rhoda's suggestion I pay for the Mail is not. While we didn’t have a paper between us all day, I had a freshly updated RSS feed of BBC News on my phone and a Hemmingway novel stashed in a fag packet, while his printed bog-roll Guardian was already dated.
To be fair though, the man had a yellow plate of pure future strapped to his bag: A solar panel charging up his camera.
The problem with the Awards reception, the difficulty that led Rhoda to accuse me of "an eating competition" with Matt, was the difficulty of obtaining the promised "lunch".
Patrolling the stiflingly hot reception room were twice as many wine slaves as there were Canapé bitches, and the Chardonnay girls were much more attentive to my needs than the oiks who couldn't ensure a reliable supply of tiny burgers.
It was a case of more top-ups than tasties, and this meant we had to keep snatching at any passing morsels to soak up all the free wine.
Free drinks were a theme of the day and I’d like to thank all those who kept up a constant supply of offers for over 13 hours, including David, Peter, and the editor of the Press Gazette who didn’t bother to get my name but passed over a beer anyway. Special mention to the very generous Marie Kinsey for the fizzy.
I’d dispute Rhoda’s suggestion that our esteemed tutors are "immune" to alcohol. Immunity doesn’t breed the kind of desperate dependency that leads to a huddle in the corner of the restaurant car at 8pm drinking warm cheap wine from stolen Champagne glasses. They’re as guilty as the rest of us.
I think I’m the only person who noticed a rival journalism award nominee push past muttering that it wasn’t a bloody bar on the train.
When we eventually got back to the beautiful North, Rhoda spent some of her winnings on more wine for us, which was very kind.
If I was her, I’d save it for the courts…
I went to London this weekend for the
Press Gazette Student Journalism Awards with the reps from Sheffo.
All the post-grads had been shortlisted as a team for our
local election coverage, and
Rhoda was up for Best Student Interviewer.
Rhoda won, which was excellent, and then proceeded to amuse us all by clambering across the lighting rig to reach the stage. We cheered her desire to venture where no other student journalists dared, clapped her efforts to take the path of most resistance, and hi-fived her refusal to look happy about the award on stage.
The rest of us, the Election Team for which I was simply a reperesentative, lost out to Homefront, a glossy magazine. On reflection, we didn't really have a hope in a category where every other finalist was a highly polished showcase periodical. Our huge cross platform effort, produced live and unedited over two days of elections, was probably just too sprawling to be taken in by the judges. It's a shame as it's some of the work I'm most proud of this year, and the closest we've come to real newsroom pressures.
I hope that doesn't seem too churlish. It's a shame we didn't get to see the other entries properly and I'm sure they were fantastic and well deserving. I just don't feel like we were really in the same contest.
The idea of entering each medium separately next year was discussed with perhaps the website or magazine alone standing a greater chance than the whole cross platform extravaganza, but this would destroy the whole purpose of converged work.
Still, we discussed our loss on the way home and concluded you can still put "Award winning" Election Project on your CVs, as the tutors at least won awards for it. And when you talk it over at interview, they never need to see all the typos that spoiled the final product.
'It's very very good time to be young'
Anne Spackman, Editor in Chief of the Times Online.Parts of Anne Spackman's talk earlier this week made me think back to
previous comments about the difficulty of getting media jobs in the UK at the moment. Editorial budgets are shrinking everywhere and there is a growing reliance on cheap agency copy combined with sexy interfaces and Google friendly headlines. Independent newsgathering is no longer a priority. Instead, money is being spent in a technology arms race that none of the newspapers feel they can rise above, even if their websites are yet to turn a profit. Everywhere money is being pumped into new distribution methods, but all this investment is still supported by revenue from the printed copy.
Anne identified a feedback loop to this process though, where the website strengthens the brand and directs readers back to the printed paper. She also noted that statistics gathered from the website are being used to improve the targeting and profitability of advertising in the printed paper. The example she used was the growth of advertising in business supplements targeting hard to reach demographics, where advertising had previously all been centred around the main news stories. The printed newspaper is still vital.
So the newspapers need solid reporting and technology on a tight budget. Step forward the youth.
Now is a 'very very good time to be young' says Anne. Young journalists have an advantage in the jobs market that is 'frankly due to age'. She described the difficulty for seasoned reporters as like 'learning a new language'; the language of the internet that the young already speak. While she was adamant that the 'same core journalism skills that have served us so well have lost none of their value', she was keen to impress on us the advantages of being able to quickly adapt to the web.
Of course the other advantage we youth have is that we're cheap. 'Tech skills as well as editorial skills make you a very valuable person', she said. Valuable to the newspapers perhaps, but is the value being passed on to these bright young workers?
According to the National Union of Journalists, 'Journalists’ starting rates are at least £7,000 less than the median starting salary for graduates'. You can snigger at the careful use of 'median' (which suggests statistical fudging to me), but it's undeniable that young journalists are underpaid compared to other trades. Again, the NUJ say that '75% of journalists earn less than the average wage of a professional worker'. We can't expect to be well rewarded then for our tech and editorial skills, even when we build enough experience to produce reliable copy. And by then we'll be to old to understand the Web 4.0 and too expensive to retain.
Still, flattery will get you anything; including budget labour. So thank you Anne for you kind words on youth, and can I have a job? I can dos teh blogs and everything,
Was this the greatest newspaper frontpage of 2007?
It has everything last year’s tabloid newspapers could have possibly wanted on the cover.We've got Maddie, Di, an X Factor contestant, allegations of rigged phone-in competitions, and the lead story combines sex and football.
It's nearly perfect.
I bet they just wished they had a slightly saucier picture to replace the cop with a crate. A silhouette of the girl, or a flash reflecting off the tinted window of a Bentley as a Man U star flees the scene. Maybe if 'Girl No.2' had been Heather McCartney or a minor pop-star - that would have been the perfect front page. But hey, it's not quite fiction, so they can only work with the news that's there. This is the one day they pulled together all the greatest hits of 2007.
I'd really like to see their daily sales figures, and see if any of the above elements are known to pull more readers. Do pictures of Diana really still sell papers? Is there a percentage circulation boost for each of those elements? Add 5% for a shot of the McCanns, 3% for a reality TV exclusive.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Daily Express featured both Maddie and Di on the front page about four times a month in the second half of last year. We've all seen it. There must be some sort of sales spike to justify that. These are ongoing stories which the tabloid editors deem to be of the highest public interest, but it's absurd to think that developments merit front-page attention as often as they get it. A cycle of demand develops with such stories where the media is always promising more to an insatiable audience. And it's sometimes hard to judge where the demand starts. Are some stories just so appealing to the media that they get built up out of all proportion and take on real significance? Editors decide which tragedies they can work with, who needs bringing down or who's attractive enough, and they push it on us.
The Sun has a whole area of its website dedicated to Maddie news, in the same way other papers cover Education, or Entertainment. The Express has a 'Diana Inquest' section, right between 'Scottish' and 'Sport' on the main menu, and 'Diana Inquest' banners all over the site to point you there. They're pushing their biggest draw. The papers have detailed statistics about readers on their websites, so they know exactly what their readers want to see more of and they move to provide it.
This might all seem obvious to anyone with an eye on the media, but I find it useful to keep going back to news sources I wouldn't normally use, and discovering this afresh.
News is a commodity; it's a product that you sell to survive.
I could easily get carried away with the higher ideals of reporting, but I'd never get very far.
So whilst I read heart-wrenching accounts from Burma this year, and some papers led with powerful and innovative info-graphics about climate change, it's the Sun that sold the most news. Front-pages like the above will never go away and will always be successful because they meet the demand. I might not like it, but I can't forget it.
My other work is slowly appearing online. If you want to take a look, the links are there on the right in the "Me, elsewhere" box. The websites are at various stages of completion.
Pretty basic, but hey, I've only had 2 months practice on this. And I know I could use a sub-editorto clean it all up, but I really hate proof reading.
Games + Health is a little feature site looking at a few issues about computer games
It hardly covers everything, but I might add things to it later.
Patchwork Peaks is there to host some of my stories from my work patch, the peak district. It's pretty simple. I didn't need to build a proper site for this work, but I threw one together to host this stuff, partly because my sources wanted to read the articles. It's not completed yet, but should be soon.
I'm still getting used to the idea of trying to make my writing as boring as possible, so that might be why it all seems a little basic and stifled.
Any coments can go here I guess.
The BBC recently celebrated ten years of it's News website.As part of a series of features about online news, they asked some 'leading lights' for comments about the future of news. This was my favourite, from Toby Young.
"If I were a young person embarking on a career today, there's no way I'd go into journalism. You might as well train as a professional fax machine operator."Which is a lovely thing to read as a trainee journalist. I particularly enjoyed the way the unnamed BBC writer undermined Toby's comments, introducing him as being uncertain and disorientated by technology. It's a cheap shot at a man volunteering himself as a target, but Young's provocative warning seems to have touched a nerve. I know he stamped on mine.
When I look at media news I see sweeping job cuts, dropping audience figures and the growth of a medium that nobody can reliably make a profit from. Even as an online news trainee, future prospects can seem a little bleak. News organisations aren’t investing in journalism, but in technology that enables the audience to share information between themselves.
In some respects, a lot of middle-men are being cut out as the news goes straight from witness to audience. But everyone knows that the rise of citizen journalism can't completely remove the need for real journalists. Audience participation can't kill the news media, but we're waiting to see how badly it can hurt it. In the end there are many things that can only be done by professionals, and these roles will continue. But we know there will be losses along the way. In the UK, the early dominance of the BBC online over the newspaper websites is creating a difficult market for competition and diversity. In many media organisations the wasteful division of newsgathering for different platforms is ending as fewer journalists are increasingly expected to adopt multiple roles.
Fine.
As a young person embarking on a career today I'm well aware of this, and honestly, this is what excites me about it. The competition for roles might be tougher, but I don't think it's radical to suggest that passionate young people with an inate grasp of the possibilities might have an edge to compete with seasoned reporters. Experience is discounted as the rules of the game change. The unions might be struggling, but the trainees are rolling in to fill the gaps.
This might not be the best far-future outlook for our bright-eyed young trainees, but given the speed of progress, worrying about the future seems a useless task. Right now, the media is alive with possibility. Traditional roles might change and mutate, but it's the young trainees who can take advantage, survive and prosper. Training as a journalist now involves core skills and forward thinking.
As for Toby Young, we only have to look at his own example. In the 90's he went right ahead and did his own thing with the Modern Review, outside the conventions of ordinary journalism. There has to be self-belief in anyone entering a new and changing field. I could be wrong about everything, but the beauty of youth is that your dreams are yet to be crushed.
So thanks for the warning Toby, but I honestly think we've got it covered.
(That said, in a previous job I was the first person to coax the busy office fax machine out of it's incessant, attention seeking beeping. So maybe that's a good career path too.)
This is the second part of my thoughts on Vice magazine. You can read part one here.
Before it was Vice, it was the Voice of Montreal. Then Voice. Then Vice. This seems appropriate to me, because behind the veneer of fashionable sleaze, it's the voices in Vice I want to read. The serious content in the magazine takes two forms; local voices and immersive journalism. In both cases the emphasis is on storytelling. Both are hugely powerful forms.
Where other publications can seem a little earnest, a little knowing or a little cynical, Vice delights because the content is often unexpected. It doesn't just contain a mixture of articles; each article can contain both humour and tragedy, usually catching you off guard for profound effect. You never quite know where things are going with each tale or anecdote. Local contributors usually have a wearily detached outlook on terrible events, enabling a clarity of description which is more startling than the tired, laboured prose usually used to describe tragedy. The writing trusts to the readers values for effect. The plain descriptive style and heavy use of photo-journalism results in a show don't tell approach, where the maturity of the reader to draw conclusions is trusted and depended upon. This promotes a shared respect between the reader and the narrative voice, and lends an inclusive profundity to the issue in hand.
Of course, the writing is not unique in style or content. A great deal of similar writing could be found online. The distinction is in the delivery method. Vice packages remarkable stories and presents them in a palatable context. You might say it hides the serious content behind the jokes, the news behind the "in other news". The grand effect of an issue of Vice is something close to Bathos; the juxtaposition of sublime and ridiculous for effect. It's a very seductive effect.
The editorial choices behind each issue are as significant as the writing. Unlike most mainstream media, Vice makes extensive use of first hand accounts and local reporting. There is a priority on carefully selected amateur content. And as amateur writing, most readers will imagine it more true, or more real than the polished presentations of the ordinary news. Vice always seems to prefer the inside, subjective account, even when they use their own writers to facilitate the account. There is no pretence towards objectivity, simply transparency. The articles nearly always take the form of directly reported speech or plainly laid out interviews with little preamble. Occasionally they send their own reporters to report the experience of being immersed in different sub-cultures; but these reports too are highly subjective and personal reflections. It's all a buffer against lazy reporting, attempting to share interesting experiences rather than mere facts.
Blogging from Iraqi homosexuals, Puerto-Rican convicts or US military deserters is probably available if you look, but in reality most of Vice's 80,000 UK readers don't look, or didn't know to look. It is the selection of content by Vice which is significant. The editors find hidden issues and neglected voices, send writers to places where misery isn't urgent enough for mainstream attention, and generally search for fresh perspectives. This is what's most important about the writing for me; the willingness to direct attention to areas outside the narrow focus of main news coverage. Every issue opens my eyes in some way, and moreover, the humour and human voices are a perfect antidote to the news fatigue caused by obsessively factual, statistical reporting.
So it's the voices I love about Vice. It's the diversity of voices and the wealth of experiences in each issue, packaged up with humour and style, that bring me back each time. It's not perfect, and perhaps sometimes a little too aware of it's own power, but on the whole - Vice is good.
One of the few publications I regularly look forward to is Vice magazine. I'm not sure if that's something I should admit, let alone link to. I wouldn't want to be seen with a copy and I'd think twice before I wrote for them. But I definitely want to read it.
If you've never encountered Vice, you can take a look online and see what you think. Better, get a paper copy. Around Sheffield you might find it in Record Collector or The Harley; but you'll have to be lucky and patient as the free copies don't last long. We're talking independent record stores and bars that sell urban art if you want to find it elsewhere. It's free, but printed and bound at a quality that few of its expensive peers can match. Each issue feels like something you hoard and display. Even it's scarcity adds value, copies being passed around and discussed.
I'm not going to dig into the history of Vice, it's growth into a multimedia brand, or the influence it's had on trendy publishing. I'm just thinking about the issues I've read in the last few years: what Vice magazine is now.
There are two ways I find Vice exciting; it's irreverence and it's sincerity. Each issue pitches you around like a gypsy fairground ride, from the heights of despairing honesty, to the twists of dark nihilism. A sample issue might contain photo-profiles of wounded Vietnamese children alongside fashion advice that pushes ironic misogyny beyond any limits. The last issue I picked up contained a fashion shoot of women whose partners had been shot dead in the UK. Each portrait was accompanied by their memories of the deceased, and notes on what the models were wearing. I find it hard to take a position on something like that. It makes me uncomfortable.
In Vice, pornography and tragedy masquerade as art, and postmodernism justifies any excess. It's... difficult. There's so much wrong with it. And yet, it works.
I think there's a gulf between the way my generation talks and the way it's allowed to talk. I doubt this is new. Vice begins to break this down, and that feels new. This is how people talk when they think nobody's listening. It feels unrestrained. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes offensive. Dressing offensive language in irony doesn't make it ok; usually it makes it worse because it inhibits the right of reply. I know this. But some things I find funny, and some I find offensive, and I know that each time I've made a judgement on the content, someone else might have judged differently. Vice is offensive, but freely offensive. It's largely indiscriminate in giving offence, testing the limits of acceptability with it's content. Sometimes it annoys me, and sometimes I laugh, complicit in bad taste.
I'm worried I'm trying to defend something here that many people will simply find too uncomfortable to bother with. There is a reason though. Inside Vice, running counterpoint to all the offensive posturing, is real, vibrant journalism; journalism that excites me with a passion for sincerity and understanding, journalism that makes me want to find similar quiet voices and get them heard. That's what I really want to talk about. But I don't think the sincerity would be quite so affecting without being embedded in so much unsettling content.
End of part one. Part two should arrive soon.
