Around Journalism | Oct 17, 2009 |
Stockton man writes headline for blog post about Peter Scowen, SEO: Around Journalism
CORRECTION 10/30/09: Mathew Ingram did not delete Peter Scowen’s blog post about headline writing. This post has been corrected to reflect that. IHM regrets the error.
Theglobeandmail.com sparked a minor hullabaloo earlier this week fter a blog post that was critical of headline writing for SEO was removed from the site. The post was written by Books Editor Peter Scowen; you can still find it here.
The debate over the decision to remove the post is similar to the discussion surrounding the Washington Post’s much more controversial Twitter guidelines, in that both involve reporters’ freedom of speech and how far a newspaper should go to build community online. Those are worthwhile topics that I’ll most likely address in the future. Today, however, I’m going to focus on another issue that was brought to light by the post’s removal.
It’s that Scowen’s ideas on headline writing, which are shared by others, might be costing the journalism industry some or most of its audience.
In his post, written after he attended a seminar on SEO, Scowen says he’s offended that a book review headline like “The marinating of the ancient rhymer” doesn’t work online.
The reason is both simple and deranged: The most important reader of Internet news headlines is not you, the sentient, curious human being, but the robots at Google that scan headlines and return search results based on what their cold, lifeless eyes tell them. Thus, ‘The marinating of the ancient rhymer,’ when processed through a search engine, would not be of any use to a person searching online for stories about, or reviews of, ‘The Anthologist.’ The idiot search engine would ignore the Globe’s review altogether, although it would immediately send the story to anyone who wanted to know how to tenderize an ancient rhymer. Our cute headline might have amused us and a few readers, but it potentially cost us a bunch of hits on our website, and that is all that matters.
(It’s interesting to note that, earlier in the post, Scowen says “The marinating of the ancient rhymer” wasn’t written for “you, the sentient, curious human being.” It was written to amuse himself and his colleagues: “I’m not going to explain that headline to anyone, because there is no point. We in the Books section had a good laugh about it. It’s the kind of fun you can get away with at a newspaper, and we went about our self-congratulatory way all pleased with ourselves.” Maybe that means the rest of his post is all bull. He’s not angry with Google. He’s angry that someone called him out for writing stupid, self-congratulatory headlines.)
What Scowen and those that agree with him fail to understand is that, unlike the dwindling audience of a that of a newspaper, the audience for a general news Web site isn’t limited to the geographic place where the news is delivered. It’s not just residents of a community who might be struck by a cute headline when they pass a newspaper box or a print edition sitting on a table in a coffee shop.
Instead, online news has a potentially worldwide audience. An online reader in Bulgaria or Croatia has the same ability to access Scowen’s reviews as a print reader in St. Catherine’s.
And those worldwide readers – who presumably are sentient, curious human beings – are the “bunch of hits” who Scowen seems to disdain.
Reaching online readers requires a different strategy than print. You can’t just hope an online reader will stumble across your Web site and be intrigued enough by a cute headline to click through to a story.
You need search engines that use algorithms to produce results for sentient, curious human beings. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to adjust those scientific algorithims to take into account a book editor’s smug sense of creativity. (If such an adjustment was possible, it would lead to this.)
So if you want to reach sentient, curious human beings worldwide through a news site, you need to write for the algorithms. You need to keep it simple, specific and direct.
Otherwise, you might soon find that your only readers are your colleagues in the book department.
I think you know how I feel about headline-writing, but just in case, a quick summary:
1. Good print headlines aren’t necessarily good web headlines.
2. Most print headlines, particularly those thought good by the people who write them, are bad.
But I think you’re too hard on Scowen, and missing an important point in invoking the “general reader”: the review in question is of a Nicholson Baker novel.
Not Nicholas Sparks. Nicholson Baker. The guy whose first novel was about a guy riding an escalator on his lunch break, tying his shoe and eating lunch? I mean, that’s interesting to me, but if you’re writing about Nicholson Baker you’re not writing for the general reader so much as for a reader most newspapers surrendered a long time ago.
“The marinating of the ancient rhymer” is…well, bad, but not as bad as clever newspaper headlines can be. I think Scowen’s declining to explain it is not patronizing — Coleridge is high school stuff; it would be patronizing to explain it to anyone interested in Nicholson Baker, or even the Globe and Mail’s book blog.
But there’s something of real value in Scowen’s post, even though he may be wrong. (And I agree that he is.)
Among our newspaper’s readership there can’t be more than maybe a dozen people who’ve even heard of Nicholson Baker. Scowen’s job, until now, has been to draw readers to a story (review) they might not otherwise be interested in, only because they haven’t heard of the author, the book, the director, whatever. (Those headlines provide negative value to interested readers. But in the case of book coverage, they would likely be reading the review anyway.)
A story on the web, as you point out, could draw readers from around the world. The geographic community isn’t irrelevant, but now we have communities of interest. As changes go, that’s downright seismic, and Scowen shouldn’t be larfed at for having trouble with handling both just as he’s righting himself.
But that’s what the journo-web-guru teaching the class did. (I imagine him What-Would-Google-Do?-ing the whole time with a Bluetooth device in his ear. I think this breed complicates and attacks deliberately, because the message isn’t that hard, and their window of opportunity is closing.) And this bad evangelist has completely failed to show Scowen that he’s got an opportunity to reach vast communities of interest, instead of having to write for angry Nicholas Sparks fans, who need a Coleridge reference explained to them.
I thought some more about this while I was doing yardwork. I underemphasised how much the guru failed to make his sell. I have a quick-trigger dislike for that entire profession. They’re more interested in back-slapping each other for getting it, and talking loudly about who doesn’t, than winning over people like Scowen.
It’s simple, Mr. Scowen: Imagine a young reader in the aisle at a bookstore. He’s drawn to a copy of The Anthologist, but he doesn’t trust the cover blurbs. He goes to his smartphone to find a review. This is an opportunity to reach a like-minded reader. The art of the old headline was to attract (and flatter, as the Coleridge headline did) the reader who, really, didn’t care. The SEO headline is for reaching the interested, the zealots, the enthusiasts, wherever they are. Do you want them to find you?
I’m looking forward to seeing your comment on the Globe and Mail’s behaviour. Scowen may not get SEO, but he obviously respects his readers enough to talk to them, to take his dilemma to them. He deserves credit for that.
I contemplated adding a few paragraphs about communities of interest (actually, I was going to cite ChristianBurkin.com as an example of a place where these headlines would work) but stopped short, primarily because Scowen’s blog was about headlines for your favorite and mine, general-circulation news Web sites.
As far as the guru goes, I’ve been struggling with how much leeway to give people who don’t grasp the basics of the new media market. I understand it’s a huge shift. But it’s a shift that’s happening very quickly. More time convincing people to get on board means less time innovating and adjusting to the new world.
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If I wasn’t won over before, I am now. The thoughtful and generous comments posted here, along with your equally intelligent and fair original post, have left me feeling like you all understand what I’m going through in this media shift better than I do.
I have a few things to say, but I’d first like to correct the perception that Mathew Ingram deleted my post. It wasn’t him; he just dealt with the fallout. That is all I will say because it is an internal matter.
I see now that what was driving me when I wrote my post was anger over the fact the few remaining years left to my beloved newspaper industry, on death’s door because of the Internet, are going to be rather cheerless because of SEO. But I’m not angry anymore, thanks to what’s been written here.
I now like the idea of reaching like-minded zealots and enthusiasts around the globe by providing Google-friendly headlines that will help them find our reviews. When I look at it like that, I no longer feel like I am writing for robots but for the sentients among us. I sincerely thank you for that.
There is a strange moral for newspapers in this. Thirty years ago, before the industry’s decline and about the time I started my career, writing anything other than a straightforward headline over a news story written in the inverted-pyramid style of wire copy was a sign of incompetence. As was failing to report on a story first and beating the competition.
Then circulation began to fall and editors started reaching out to new, younger readers, to women and to other identifiable groups, and we got cuter and more feature-intensive. We started to dilute the meaning of the word “news.” We experimented with new looks that allowed us to package stories in magazine style. We gave columnists free rein to write about their personal lives. We focussed as much on analysis as on real-time reporting. There’s more, but the bottom line is none of it has kept us from getting where we are today.
And where are we today? We are at a moment where writing straightforward news headlines over copy written in real time in the inverted-pyramid style of the good old days is now imperative; where getting that long-forgotten newspaper word — “today” — into a story is again a must if we are to compete with our Internet rivals.
Writing and reporting for the Internet, in short, is bringing us full circle to the glory days of newspapering. That’s an odd sort of progress.
Ian, if you wouldn’t mind I’d appreciate it if you could amend your post to make note of the fact that I didn’t remove the post — in fact, I argued strenuously *against* removing the post, and pushed hard to be allowed to write anything about it at all. It’s my belief (not shared by everyone) that these issues need to be discussed out in the open, not behind closed doors, and that admitting our mistakes actually makes us *more* trustworthy rather than less.
Thanks in advance.
Mathew Ingram
Communities Editor,
The Globe and Mail
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