How do you treat your newspaper copy online?

In putting this hypervideo story together, I came across some some choice cuts from a fly-on-wall approach when the Telegraph invited a group of us on a tour of their newsroom.

It's senior exec was very gracious in answering a range of questions.

This one concerns how journalists treat their copy before it goes online.

Now, I didn't ask my colleague what he meant behind the question, but my guess is it has to do with SEO, Key word density and the likes.

You're writing for two audiences, and if you're clued up on writing Jakob Nielsen style, with Search Engine Optomisation for a good measure, you'll score big time.

Some CMS programmes we've discovered are better at wooing bots ( spiders crawling your text) than others.

SEO of the journalist

It's likely the very mention of SEO draws bewildering stares, bordering on lunacy, from a room of journalists - the non-techy types.

So spending the evening rummaging through my monthly susbscription ( I have rarely looked at it) of SEO news at times seemed futile and truth, grrrr mind numbling tedious.

Gosh ! You could spend a lifetime "safe cracking" the wherewithalls of SEO and towards what end: world domination.

It's debatable in the end, but there's some truth in the matter that key-word indexing and obeying the rules of SEO may even usurp quality of articles.

Fancy that, a new breed of journalists who write well, even perhap mediocrely, but reach high rankings because of their understanding of how bots and robots work.


Content in not king, well. . .
Content is, yes you're ahead of me, but that means nothing, or does it, if you no one can find you?

Most newspapers by dint of having an audience and a litany of fine writers get bangs for their bucks, but their hegemony stands to be challenged in an evolving web which increasingly packages varying algorithims around how we say what we say and how we link those.

I ran an experiment two weeks ago posting a set of articles for a site in an area previously neglected and within the week noted it had climbed to the front page of a three million page index.

That's not bravado, but illustrates how writing for the web, ( go look at Jakob) is fundamentally different to writing elsewhere.

Interestingly I also learned that Jakob eschews blogs in favour of articls for online sites.

It's worth drilling his article to understand his point.

And the over arching point in all this: everyone wants to be linked to, BUT not all links give you street cred.

In fact some links even devalue you: I'm picking up my book on advanvced mathematics to distil this in easy language.

Blog Value
But blogs though have huge benefits which need little explaining.

It's a point well exercised in the first six sessions for some of our cohorts working online.

For what it's worth a strong draw on a video ( which has its own rules) coupled with linking articles might just do the trick.

Trouble is you'll grow grey hairs stuck to your PC.

Time to get a life!