Newspaper Headlines Bow to SEO Demands

Hallelujah. 

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.'

This is another on my growing list of personal bug-bears. It's a symptom of the way current media editorialises and sensationalises the news rather than reporting it. It's dumbing down. It's disrespectful - of the subject, and the audience. And it's worse than that - it's just lazy.

I work for a company called Egg. The company's been going for 8 years now, so it always makes me wonder what the journalist thinks of when they file their report. Do they think nobody's thought of using the word "poached" in a headline about us before? Does it make them proud of their work?

This kind of thing always reminds me of a newspaper that was in the window of an old fashioned barber's shop I used to walk past. The headline ran "The King died peacefully in his sleep last night". You just know that if it were reported today, it would simply read "KING DEAD".

And yes, I know I've got plenty of pun based titles on this blog - the keyword there is "blog". This isn't jorunalism. I'm editorialising like all get-go.

I sincerely hope this trend is on its way out (Egg got bought out last week, and the number of normal headlines was way more than normal.)

Besides, this kind of thing just makes me look like a grumpy old man.

Source: Newspaper Headlines Bow to SEO Demands