The death of quality journalism - or - how to give a story Google juice

When Heath Ledger died in January, the online version of The Sydney Morning Herald, where the headline writers have been thoroughly drilled on search engine optimisation (SEO) came up with "Heath Ledger dies". Dull and unimaginative, but effective in attracting traffic from search engines. Much more so than The Age's "Dead in Bed".

These dull headlines are more important than you might think. They are a glimpse into the world of the multi-billion dollar SEO industry which is reshaping our news as media companies around the world struggle to find sustainable business models for their online offerings.

Advertising provides most of the revenue for online media sites and traffic is critical for maximising those advertising dollars. No news there. Audience size, measured by ratings and readership surveys, has always been a key factor in determining advertising revenues.

The difference now is that the revenue generating capacity of individual stories, and the journalists who create them, can be measured precisely and in real time. Editors can publish, promote and remove stories depending on the traffic they are drawing - and the advertising dollars they are earning.

The temptation to choose and shape stories to maximise ad revenue may be overwhelming, especially when most online media sites are still losing money or surviving on wafer-thin profit margins.

Search dominates the Internet

It provides the structure we all use to sort and find information. As each year goes by, more people are using this new structure to find their news.

While Australian media sites average about 20 per cent of traffic from search engines, the Times Online in Britain says it gets anywhere from 30 per cent to 60 per cent.

Across the Atlantic, Boston.com, home to The Boston Globe, has used SEO-friendly headlines to become the fourth most visited newspaper site in the country, despite having a daily paper circulation ranked about 15th.

Search engines bring a different audience. They are casual consumers of news attracted by particular topics, often involving celebrities and lifestyle. They don’t care about mastheads and bylines. They are fickle. But they are the only growth market available to online publishers.

David Higgins, Editor of news.com.au, points to one of the most expensive Google search terms, "mesothelioma", to demonstrate the potential distorting effect of these new commercial realities.

In a world where advertisers pay more than fifty bucks for a click on the phrase "mesothelioma law firms", Higgins asks, in the latest issue of The Walkley Magazine, "How tempting might it be to commission a few extra James Hardie stories a week or simply add a few pars about mesothelioma into existing stories?"

Reflecting the power of search, news stories are now marketed individually and urgently.

The Heath Ledger case

When Ledger died The Sydney Morning Herald had much more than good headlines to attract traffic. It had compelling content and timing. The content included videos taken on a satellite-connected video camera by one of their journalists who heard a rumour and got onto the story with impressive speed.

The story also broke at the right time of day, just as the big North American online content aggregators were swinging into action at the start of another day in the world's largest market for English-language news. The Sydney Morning Herald got the story at the start of the world's news cycle and it had a fantastic opportunity to dip into rivers of search engine gold.

As bloggers and others take up a story and start talking about it, they link to the original piece, giving it google juice and pushing it up search engine rankings.

They also share the story through social networking sites like Facebook. When it comes to attracting casual news consumers, links and sharing are the name of the game.

But it takes a few hours for the links to do their magic, so The Sydney Morning Herald marketing team swung into operation to bid at auction for the right to own key search terms for those critical few hours between news of his death and when the search robots and algorithms took over.

But I didn't sign up for marketing

In the future, journalists will have greater involvement in the task of marketing their stories.

Search engines scan the title, headline and at least the first 100 words or so of news articles, which means some journalists are urged to use online tools to research the key words most frequently used by people searching on the topics they are writing about. These words can then be strategically placed in the story.

Journalists will also be expected to encourage others, including sources, to link to their stories.

Pushed to its logical conclusion SEO will unite editorial and advertising responsibilities in a single person: the journalist. The ethical and professional issues are profound and so far they have been largely swept under the carpet.

Apart from concerns about the possibility of stories being selected, written and promoted with the value of key words in mind; there is also the fear that the growing importance of casual users will see quality journalism outlets come under pressure to become more tabloid online.

Slate magazine's Jack Shafer has pointed to evidence for this trend in the prevalence of wacky headlines at CNN.com where stories about babies being mauled by tigers and protests about ads that feature nude nuns are, he says, getting undue prominence and headlines are becoming downright banal; a prime example is "Baby pandas! Baby pandas! Baby pandas!"

A similar trend is evident on Australia's large media sites which now give far more prominence to tabloid-style stories than their offline versions ever did.

SEO proponents, inside and outside media organisations, argue that the new techniques are just updated versions of what has always happened. But the imperfections in measuring audience responses in the past allowed for a healthy, if often uneasy, separation of editorial and advertising. Journalists took pride in their ignorance of anything to do with advertising, marketing and sales. The space in which to hide from the commercial realities is rapidly disappearing.

We have a lot to fear in the growing fragmentation and micro-measurement of our quality media. Something valuable will be lost when the profit (or loss) is calculated on each and every story. And editorial decisions are made accordingly.