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

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.