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.

Headlines?

[despik]

Since when search engines care only about the headlines?

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?!

About time

[taustin]

Newspapers that use headlines that actually tell you what the story is aobut, rather than making a cheap joke out of someone's misey? If the profession of journalism had any integrity, this would never have been a story, because the offensiveness of turning news headlines in to jokes would never have happened in the first place.

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.

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).

As A Journalist...

[TyrWanJo]

I worked for a couple years on a School Newspaper, http://www.dailyillini.com/ [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.

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.

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

Good idea but not particularly new

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically, what they're saying is that headlines have to make sense out of context? It's good practice. With printed headlines, you just need to move your eyes down a bit to read the article or look at a picture if the headline isn't immediately obvious. On the Web, it's a lot more effort (comparatively, clicking a mouse is much more effort than moving your eyes). On a number of occasions, I've clicked an unclear headline only to find that it was about something completely unrelated to what I expected.

In any case, this isn't new. In 1998, usability type Jakob Nielsen [useit.com] said that Web headlines and the like need to be clear [useit.com].