http://www.webroyalty.com

http://www.webroyalty.com

Hello Thanks heaps for this indeed!… if anyone else has anything, it would be much appreciated. Great website Super Piano Links http://www.en.Grand-Pianos.org Enjoy!…

Thanks in advance.

Mathew Ingram

Communities Editor,
The Globe and Mail

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.