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.

Comments

That's the Boston Globe's site

[isdnip]

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.

Old news; dupe

[1u3hr]

See This Boring Headline Is Written for Google, NYT April 2006. Covered by Slashdot.

Uh, why?

[jd]

It seems perfectly easy to have the page use an SSI to patch in a "traditional" headline for human readers and a "searchable" headline for webcrawlers. It involves a conditional SSI that checks the browser ID, an else clause, and an end of conditional. Three lines. Since these pages are all dynamically generated from a template, all you do is surround each of the headline areas. A few minutes work, not much more, and if the conditional makes an error, the alternative is perfectly good.

(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.)

Re:Uh, why?

[jZnat]

And that's a surefire way to get banned from Google's results. They don't like it when people show different content dependant on user agent.

Hed + Eyebrow

[Roblimo]

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....