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.

information wants to be anthropomorphised.

[macadamia_harold]

Newspaper Headlines Bow to SEO Demands

Did the SEO have hostages?

Headlines?

[despik]

Since when search engines care only about the headlines?

Old news; dupe

[1u3hr]

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

Re:Old news; dupe

[anagama]

Ya beat me to it. I suppose this is a way in which "news" sites can cut back on reporters yet still generate content which gets them search results -- simply republish old news 8-12 months later. In this way, we're not only doomed to repeat history, we're doomed to read about it twice (at least).

Re:Old news; dupe

[bazald]

Slashdot should train its editors to put "dupe" in its headlines! That way, we'll have an easier time finding the latest Slashdot dupes using Google news!

What?!

[JanneM]

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?!

Re:What?!

[vic-traill]

Well, straight news headlines are one thing, I suppose. However, sportswriters are damned near defined by the puns that they do linguistic flips and twists to get into their headlines and stories.

I will confess that while I groan and turn my nose up like everyone else, I secretly admire headlines like 'Bull riders in chute-out tonight at the Corel' (from when Ottawa's Scotiabank Place - blech - was called the Corel Centre). It takes Glengarry Glen Ross-sized brass balls to put your name beside that teaser.

So, while I do appreciate the desirability of headlines that actually have something to do with the story, it would be a shame to see all headlines homogenized in a quest to improve SE rankings and thus eyeballs for advertising.

The Guardian is a perfect example of how a little guy can look real big on-line; while it is the second smallest national print newspaper in the U.K., it gets more than 7.5 million views per month, more than a quarter of those views going to readers in the U.S.

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/business/1063229872.php

Emily Bell - Editor in Chief of the Guardian Unlimited, which is what the on-line version is called - attributes the bulk of the Guardian's on-line success to the high volume of blog and Google links to Guardian articles, a result, she says, of *not* requiring registration to read the Guardian on-line.

Re:What?!

[Seraphim_72]

No, what you will get instead is:

HMS Britannia's swan song as she is sunk for new reef, fisheries to benefit
Titles made to titillate, no thanks I will take the newspaper's bad ones instead. All they have to do is slightly inform, not bow to an algorithm.

Sera

Witty headlines.

[TapeCutter]

Reminds me of the time when Virgin airlines lost out on gate allocations at Sydney airport. The bussiness headline read "Virgin get screwed".

Thank God

[pavon]

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.

As A Journalist...

[TyrWanJo]

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.

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.

sEo, not sCo

[philo_enyce]

man, on first glance i read that as:

"Newspaper Headlines Bow to SCO Demands"

phew.

philo

Tags?

[Ando[evilmedic]]

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.

Being informative and witty

[roskakori]

From the submitter:

Forget about clever puns, double entendres and witty analogies

It doesn't have to be this way. As a couter example, consider The Register: they typically use a main caption that is informative, and a smaller sub caption that attempts to be witty. Some quotes from their current front page:

• Vista encryption 'no threat' to computer forensics
  Who needs a backdoor when users leave the Windows open?
• Officials sued for $3m for disciplining MySpace spoofers
  Bloodied principal, muzzled students
• Internet users play tag with online content: study
  Folksonomies
• Romania: Software piracy made us what we are today
  Thank-you, Mr Gates

I could do without the clever parts though.

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....