Slashdot Mirror
Newspaper Headlines Bow To SEO Demands
prostoalex writes "News.com.com says the art of writing newspaper headlines is changing due to reliance on search engines for traffic to newspaper archives. Forget about clever puns, double entendres and witty analogies: 'News organizations that generate revenue from advertising are keenly aware of the problem and are using coding techniques and training journalists to rewrite the print headlines, thinking about what the story is about and being as clear as possible.' One big winner for now is Boston.com, The Boston Globe property, which 'had training sessions with copy editors and the night desk for the newspaper to enforce Web-optimized keyword-rich headlines suitable for search engine queries.'" Update: 10/30 14:1 GMT by KD : Corrected mis-attributed ownership: boston.com is owned by the Boston Globe, not the Boston Herald.
Boston.com does not belong to the Herald, but to its bigger arch-rival, the Boston Globe. Actually they're part of the New York Times Company.
Newspaper Headlines Bow to SEO Demands
Did the SEO have hostages?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Sick Transit's Glorious Monday.
Since when search engines care only about the headlines?
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
See This Boring Headline Is Written for Google, NYT April 2006. Covered by Slashdot.
What are you saying? We'll get clear, concise headlines that actually summarize the story? Oh, the horror, oh the humanity! Will the pain never end?!
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Reminds me of the time when Virgin airlines lost out on gate allocations at Sydney airport. The bussiness headline read "Virgin get screwed".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Newspapers that use headlines that actually tell you what the story is aobut, rather than making a cheap joke out of someone's misey? If the profession of journalism had any integrity, this would never have been a story, because the offensiveness of turning news headlines in to jokes would never have happened in the first place.
Arent we all sick of seeing the same cliched "witty" and "clever" headlines?
During my brief stint studying journalism, the editors had a hoot writing clever and witty headlines. Off the top of my head: "Bond goes up to bat" (describing a school bond measure on the ballot) and "Political party poppycock" (a column discussing political absurdities). But the times are a-changin'. If you want Google News or some other aggregator to pick up your story, you need a clear headline. This isn't limited to news media either. I've noticed that more and more videogame review sites will come up with a killer summary line that stands out when it's aggregated on sites like Metacritic. ("The experience of playing this game can be roughly compared to swimming through a pile of sewage to get to a diamond ring," from a review of X3: Reunion that appears on Metacritic.)
Newspaper headlines are horrible. Between the fact that english has far too many words that could be both nouns or verbs depending on context, that proper often nouns cannot be discerned from normal words when everything is capitalized, and journalists being way too clever for their own good leads to monstrosities of randomly juxtaposed words that cannot be parsed until you have read at least the first couple paragraphs of the article.
Making them write a headline that tells a reader what the story is about. Oh dear Gods Nooo!! How cruel and inhuman.
Who knows what horrors this will lead to. Next they'll be forced into _proofreading_ their stories and using correct spelling, grammar and punctuation.
While they are fixing things maybe they could abolish the "Grim Task" rule. You know the one I mean. The rule that says any time people are hauling bodies out of the scene of some disaster they can only use the phrase "Grim Task" to describe it. - "Today rescue crews began the grim task of recovering bodies from the......."
Some headlines are just better left where they are :
0 .html
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2004040451,0
I worked for a couple years on a School Newspaper, http://www.dailyillini.com/The Daily Illini, at the University of Illinois, and although it was a School paper, it was at the time the top rated University paper in America, and also in direct competition with the local news paper, The News Gazette. One of the things that i learned was that there is a constant tension between journalists and the advertisers that make the paper run. We were independent, we relied, and the paper still does rely, entirely on ads to cover the costs of running the paper and paying the journalists. People always gripe about how much journalism is a whore to the forces of the general populous, but, in order for a paper to sustain itself, it has to be.
Responsible journalism takes a hit from the interestes of keeping a paper running - and it is always a struggle to determine which stories are best suited to these interests. The fact that headlines are changing is, frankly, not surprising, except in the fact that this change has come so late. Print journalism is floundering in a morass of uncertainty, people rarely pick up the paper anymore, and insted get their information online. Previous posters have said that headlines are dumb, ill-concieved, etc, however, headlines are the most, and often, only part of a paper ever read, and copy editors, who are responsible for headlines, often just sit around fixing grammar, spelling, and ap style, their last bastion of hope was these ridiculous headlines. How do you cram as much information as possible in to two or three words, and keep people interested in the story? If the headline is sucessful, a person will continue reading, if not, at least he or she will get the information she needs.
The alteration of headlines is both disheartening and expected. It is that ugly journalist versus ads department rearing its ugly head - something has to die in order for the paper to live. Views and click-throughs now generate the capital that print advertising once garnered, so it is unfourtunately imperative for newspapers to change with the times. It is an end to an era of whimsy generated by underpaid and understimulated spell-checkers, and I think, however inevitable, it is kind of sad.
And when do they start trading backlinks to build page rank?
Alas, Paris Hilton, that you didn't put Paris Hilton in your post subject, thus dooming your post to the eternity of never coming up in a search again, Parison Hilton.
I don't understand, Paris Hilton, why you would connect simple news headlines to mass censorship, that seems like a pretty far leap that only you, Paris Hilton, would make.
(Search engines don't like you replacing the entire page with a bunch of keywords, but since the engine is going to get the massaged headline no matter what, improving the interface for the users doesn't seem to be too great a sacrifice.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticks_Nix_Hick_Pix
Headlines are different for a newspaper where you're trying to draw attention to a story when someone's already on the page. The reader is already looking there, you need to catch their attention to a portion of the page, you're not attracting them to a paper on a rack. For readers who are searching for a specific story, clear and concise is the way to be found.
There's still room for "style" in headlines. If it's your paper ( webpage) someone's looking at, use catchy titles to draw the eye. On pages that are specific to a story, stick with the clear and concise. By that time you've got their attention and it's the time to start giving the information they are looking for.
Search engines are going to deep link to the story's page anyway, so there's no need to resort to funny at that point.
Actually, it's not important at all. Who cares? "Stuff that matters"... Bull! Any given single gluon on the dark side of the Moon has more relevance to any given Slashdot reader than the entire Earth and all it's past, current, and future residents combined will ever matter to the Universe. Go crawl in a hole and ponder the worthlessness of your existence.
"Newspaper Headlines Bow to SCO Demands"
phew.
philo
It seems to me that this would be the perfect use of tags - let the papers keep their current style of headline, but tag the stories for parsing by google news et al.
Copied from slacktivist.typepad.com in response to a near identical post:
So far as I can tell, America Deceived was never available through Amazon because the publisher (iUniverse) never offered it for sale through any channel other than their own website. iUniverse can be reached at 1-800-AUTHORS, if you wish to confirm this for yourself.
Personally, I suspect you already knew that, though. After all, it's a nice little marketing tactic. "This book about government conspiracies, and Amazon won't sell it - because of a government conspiracy!Quick! Buy it from here before they get to Google, too!"
Even though Google Books has nothing to do with the link you provided, anyway. Which just happens to appear on many comments in many political weblogs, and nowhere else. Could it be that these comments are being placed by employees of iUniverse in an attempt to spur sales of a book that has been panned by every reviewer for (among other things) unintelligible grammar?
See? I can dream up conspiracies, too.
Oh, and iUniverse's website describes it as a "novel", which generally means "fiction". Which makes the conspiracy against it seem even weaker.
Should I add more keywords?
Seriously- in written Chinese, single characters will have multiple definitions, and words are often made from several characters, which can be read separately for a different meaning, extremely rich ground for jokes. This is ignoring the incredible number of generally understood metaphors and traditional sayings in Chinese culture. On top of that, there are tons of homophones, near homophones (because of tones), and multiple words with the same definitions, which makes punning a national pastime.
Somehow, though, the mainland newspapers don't seem to have much of a sense of humor.
*i*, currently, study, journalism, my, self, and, this, seems, quite, frag, mented...
This is a solution urgently seeking a problem. Sounds like somebody's Master's Thesis being taken out for a walk.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
maybe slashdot should try clearer, more concise headlines? Seriously, I know i am not the only one that gets suckered into reading some BS story about baseball players http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/01/ 0425216
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
One other interesting fact about newspaper headline writing is that the headline writer is given a character count by the page editor -- i.e., a 3-column story with a certain type size would need a certain number of characters to fill in the headline.
There were some other style guidelines regarding how lines could be split ("and" couldn't be the first word on a continuation line, for example), so it was rather impressive to see what gems could be made with the various constraints.
- Vista encryption 'no threat' to computer forensics
- Officials sued for $3m for disciplining MySpace spoofers
- Internet users play tag with online content: study
- Romania: Software piracy made us what we are today
I could do without the clever parts though.Who needs a backdoor when users leave the Windows open?
Bloodied principal, muzzled students
Folksonomies
Thank-you, Mr Gates
One of the things that i learned was that there is a constant tension between journalists and the advertisers that make the paper run.
Did you run adverts dressed as news, or did the advertisers get an Opinion Center?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
They need only add a subheading for SEO purposes, they can use display: none to relegate the descriptive title to pure search engine spam.
Search engine spammers are the last people who should be defining language use.
"...forces of the general populous..."
Who is general populous?
Did you mean population? Did you mean populace? Did you mean the whims of the mob?
"...understimulated spell-checkers..."
Judging by your post, your spell-checker may be comatose.
These might seem to be minor points on any other discussion board, but when it comes to the issue of the public's trust in information provided as long as it's paid for in advance, minor points can--and do--destroy the source's credibility.
if you want the title of your article to get more hits on google, just add paris hilton to the title. great, just what we need is news services being more blatantly manipulative.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
So basically, what they're saying is that headlines have to make sense out of context? It's good practice. With printed headlines, you just need to move your eyes down a bit to read the article or look at a picture if the headline isn't immediately obvious. On the Web, it's a lot more effort (comparatively, clicking a mouse is much more effort than moving your eyes). On a number of occasions, I've clicked an unclear headline only to find that it was about something completely unrelated to what I expected.
In any case, this isn't new. In 1998, usability type Jakob Nielsen said that Web headlines and the like need to be clear.
I know I'm inviting The Wrath of Slashdot by even mentioning Fox News, but their website (and probably other news websites as well) uses the clever headlines for links on their front page, but then gives the boring-yet-informative headline on the actual article.
For example, the article officially titled "Report: Giant Weights to Be Dropped Into Mouth of Erupting Mud Volcano" received the link text "Can Giant Balls Plug Erupting Volcano?"
Anything that limits creativity is evil and should be destroyed.
On the Internet, all a reader sees of a story on a site's main page are the hed and lede (journo shorthand for "headline" and "lead paragraph"), which makes them more important than they are in a paper publication where a reader can glance down a bit and see more of the story.
Some online publications are now using an "eyebrow" sentence below the hed -- essentially a long subhed, in effect a brief story summary.
I like this style because it gives readers -- and search engines -- a good idea of what's in the story without forcing the writer to load its first paragraph with too many facts. Instead, the writer has the option of opening a story with a quote, a description, an anecdote or something else instead of the traditional, terse lede.
News has always been tailored to its delivery medium. The "inverted pyramid" style, where a story is written so that the most important facts come first, and others are delivered in decreasing order of importance until the story trails off into irrelevance, was developed to make "cutting" a story to fit a given amount of space simple. The typesetter simply took sentences off the end of the story until it was the right length.
Back in the days of hand-set type, and even later, during the pre-offset Linotype (hot metal typesetting machine) period, the type was set backwards, as a mirror image, so editing a story with any kind of judgement during the typesetting process was a time-consuming task. It was easier to whack the end, sentence by sentence -- and many newspapers used one-sentence paragraphs to make this even easier -- and if a story ended up a bit short the typesetter could stick in a small-type "filler" story chosen for size, not relevance.
(Fillers were once a whole separate wire service genre. AP's fillers almost always contained the phrase, "It was reported yesterday." You would read a story about local political malfeasance, and at the end, usually in italics, you'd see a little piece that said someting like, "Hummingbirds often migrate 2000 miles or more every Spring and Fall, it was reported yesterday." Fillers not only filled the type case -- which had to be "locked down" to keep all the type from falling out when it was put on the press, but brought zest to newspapers. I think I last saw a newspaper filler in 1974 or so, but I still miss fillers. Slashdot quotes of the day just aren't the same...)
In TV news, the basic story style tends to be a spoken hed, possibly with a brief shot of the scene, followed by a "more after this" statement, then a commercial break. The linear format of television broadcasting, combined with its dependence on inline ads for revenue, makes this format the standard one, as ingrained in TV people as the inverted pyramid syle is in newspaper journalists.
And so on. I assume direct neural "full sense" info delivery will create another whole set of story styles.
The medium may not be the message, but it plays a large part in determining how that message is delivered.
Headlines written to please search engines rate no more than a small sidebar in the endless tale of media evolution. And sidebars.... they rate a whole rant of their own. Deciding what information should be in a story's main body and what should be relegated to sidebar status is as much of an art as headline writing....
It was on the cover, and it was a news story about a dead person found in a strip club:
8 568/
"Headless Body Found in Topless Bar"
Here are some other interesting headlines: http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/anniversary/35th/n_
That's a wordy, grammatically incorrect blob of text, and you should capitalize "I" and not "School". Like so many U of I grads you got a crappy education (while convincing yourself it was a "top rated School", so my sympathies. Comparing the DI to the News Gazoo isn't really a smart idea, anyway. The News Gazette has what, a 5th grade reading level?
When I worked as a reporter, my greatest pet peeve was some dimwit section editor putting a cutesy headline on my story.
The problem with much of the Internet age is that it step 1 is done immediately without question and by the time step 4 is reached years have gone by.