Last week, I reported that six out of 10 news executives think the Internet is changing the fundamental values of journalism. Well, news search engines and social media are also changing industry best practices in newsrooms, too.
Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr
At SES New York 2010, there were two sessions that highlighted these changes. One was entitled, “News Search Optimization,” and the other was entitled, “Real Time SEO: No More Yesterday’s News.”
Among the speakers at these sessions were Topher Kohan, SEO Manager, CNN; Matthew J. Brown, Director of Search Strategy, New York Times Company; and Allison Fabella, SEO & Social Media Manager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Outsell has released data showing the continuing demise of print newspapers in favor of digital technology. They surveyed 2,787 US news consumers to get an idea of their preferences on receiving news.
57% go to digital sources, which is up from 33% just a few years ago. Online news aggregators are popular among news users, coming in at 31% compared to newspaper sites at 8%.
Apparently, the fondness for news aggregators stems from a desire to quickly devour news. 44% of visitors to Google News simply scan the headlines.
Two weeks ago, I commented on Rupert Murdoch’s threat that News Corp. was thinking of blocking Google from being able to search its Web sites: “Murdoch to Google: Drop Dead.”
Now it appears that Microsoft and News Corp. are talking about a deal that would involve News Corp getting paid to prevent its news content from being indexed by Google, Google News, Yahoo! and Yahoo! News and only get found when you did a search on Bing.
Is this a marriage made in hell?
I’ll by flying to San Diego this weekend to speak at the PRSA 2009 International Conference next week. Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and a member of the SES Advisory Board, will also be speaking at the annual Public Relations Society of America event.
Odden is speaking on Monday, November 9, at 10:15 a.m. about “Help Google Find Your Releases: Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Tactics for Public Relations Professionals.”
Nine out of 10 journalists, reporters and editors use search engines to do their jobs, according to a recent survey by TopRank Online Marketing. In this environment, public relations professionals must understand the ins and outs of search engine optimization (SEO).
This week, I saw an optimized press release blown away by Google News because it was mistaken for a social media press release. It fell under a hail of bullets, an innocent victim of a formatting decision. Before I share this tragic story, let me provide some background.
Two years ago, I asked, “Is the Social Media Press Release a Meatball Sundae?” I had just finished reading Seth Godin’s book, Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?, which defined “meatball sundae” as “the unfortunate result of mixing two good ideas.” And I answered my rhetorical question by accusing the “social media press release” alias “social media news release” alias “social media release” of being a meatball sundae.
Newspaper publishers are reaching such new lows with their arguments against search engines, I wonder how they stay in business at all. I mean, doesn’t journalism require gathering facts and analyzing them?
The latest low is an Australian newspaper publisher who says that search engines indexing newspaper sites is essentially breaking and entering.
WRONG.
If anything, your newspaper is like a dance club, and you can deny entrance to the search engines if they’re not dressed up enough for your taste. Just slap some no index code on your robots.txt file and it’s like hiring the best bouncer in town.
