Newspaper Headlines Bow To SEO Demands 75
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.
That's the Boston Globe's site (Score:5, Informative)
information wants to be anthropomorphised. (Score:5, Funny)
Did the SEO have hostages?
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Yes. You, and eight zillion people who are getting most of their news via things other than dead trees.
A particularly apt headline (Score:2)
Headlines? (Score:2, Insightful)
Since when search engines care only about the headlines?
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Since when search engines care only about the headlines?
Search engines read the HTML, and evaluate it according to its structure. And in general a big heading like H1 is more important than a H2-heading, which is more important than a paragraph. So the search engine values big headings more, and ranks words found in it higher. The same goes for the order of headings, keywords and description tags, the title of the page, url-path of the page and the domain name.
Old news; dupe (Score:5, Informative)
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What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 tease
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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. (Score:5, Funny)
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"Virgin Crew Strokes Charles at Dawn."
About time (Score:1, Insightful)
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Lets look back on that story about Dick Cheney shooting his lawyer buddy in the face with a shotgun. What this article is talking about doing is reducing the headlines within the ht
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Give the machines thoose jobs & let everyone else screw off & make jokes all day.
Too bad (Score:2)
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I have rarely enjoyed headline puns and usually just find them irritating instead. I'm sure the journalists think it's funny because other journalists think it's funny.
Kind of like webcomic artists who think characters talking to the writer is somehow witty because the other webcomics all do the same.
It's not funny. It might have been funny the first 10 times it was done but now it's stale and boring. If you ask me the search engines have done them a huge favor by forcing them to put an end to it.
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are those supposed to be funny or clever?
aside from being useless, annoying, and distracting, "clever" headlines sometimes produce misinformation.
for example, consider this recent headline from linuxtoday.com:
"Fluendo Media Decoders Sound
Thank God (Score:3, Insightful)
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They do try writing. The monologues are one of the best sources of horrific comedy anywhere--even Jay knows it. This does not stop us from watching--though I do it only on nights when I think "Headlines" will air.
Re:A sublte form of censorship Paris Hilton (Score:2)
I don't understand, Paris Hilton, why you would connect simple news headlines to mass censorship, that seems like a pretty far leap that only you, Paris Hilton, would make.
About Time (Score:1)
Who knows what horrors this will lead to. Next they'll be forced into _proofreading_ their stories and using correct spelling, grammar and punctuation.
While they are fixing things maybe they could abolish the "Grim Task" rule. You know the one I mean. The rule that says any time people are hauling bodies out of the scene of some disaster they can only use the phrase "Grim Task" to describe i
As A Journalist... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Did you run adverts dressed as news, or did the advertisers get an Opinion Center?
Backlinks? (Score:1)
Uh, why? (Score:5, Informative)
(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? (Score:5, Informative)
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Sticks Nix Hick Pix (Score:2)
Headlines are different for a newspaper where you're trying to draw attention to a story when someone's already on the page. The reader is already looking there, you need to catch their attention to a portion of the page, you're not attracting them to a paper on a rack. For readers who are searching for a specific story, clear and concise is the way to be found.
There's still room for "style" in headlines. If it's your paper ( webpage) someone's looking at, u
sEo, not sCo (Score:3, Funny)
"Newspaper Headlines Bow to SCO Demands"
phew.
philo
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Tags? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Indeed, and subject tags (keywords) have been used for ages in academic papers for precisely this purpose (indexing, not even limited to computerized indexing). However, I guess those few newspaper editors who even barely understand the concept are afraid they would have to display all those tags to the human reader at the beginning of each article, just like the printed scientific journals do it.
The article mentions tweaking other fields beside the headline as well, such as the page title going into the b
Old dogs and reinventing the wheel (Score:2)
The problem with much of the I
Gay Terrorist Stem Cell Baby Kills Environment (Score:2)
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Planners Spanner Banners! (Score:2)
This is a solution urgently seeking a problem. Sounds like somebody's Master's Thesis being taken out for a walk.
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If only we had some way to signal the computer about the form of text, without cluttering up the reader's content.
Yeah, but if we had that, people would just abuse it to draw traffic to their sites, so we'd get a new kind of search engine. The new kind of search engine would figure that people want to find search terms where the content matches the search terms rather than where the meta-information matches the search terms. This new type of search engine would give more credit to headings (which are bigger and easier to read). Further, it might lower pages in its search rankings if the meta-information does not ma
also removes length restrictions (Score:2)
There were some other style guidelines regarding how lines could be split ("and" couldn't be the first word on a continuation line, for example), so it was rather impressive to see what gems could be made with the various constraints.
Being informative and witty (Score:2, Interesting)
It doesn't have to be this way. As a couter example, consider The Register [theregister.co.uk]: 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:
Who needs a backdoor when users leave the Windows open?
Bloodied principal, muzzled students
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just add paris hilton to the title (Score:1)
Good idea but not particularly new (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
I
For every headline there is a season (Score:2)
For example, the article officially titled "Report: Giant Weights to Be Dropped Into Mouth of Erupting Mud Volcano" received the link text "Can Giant Balls Plug Erupting Volcano?"
Evil (Score:1)
Hed + Eyebrow (Score:5, Informative)
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....
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If you thought communications systems have a horrid "uptime" now, it is downright miserable when the telegraph first was up and going. Having a good connection for a few minutes or hours was considered good service, and it would often go down even for "natural events", much less