Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: seo

Weather coverage made easy

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On February 19, 2010

In My Work, Surviving

Weather is big business for those of us in news, especially when it gets to be extreme weather like just about every state has experienced in the last two weeks.

Lots of news outlets have developed amazing new ways to get out weather information and pull in interaction from readers, but sometimes what’s simple can work in a pinch.

Most of the time when we’ve had snowstorms in the past, we at Cincinnati.Com have had a basic story file set up that we re-top and add to throughout the day as the news changes. Without the occasional total re-write during the course of the news cycle, it can end up reading like a very long Frankenstein of an article, with the possibility of specific items getting buried in all of the text.

I recently set up a basic WordPress blog specifically to handle weather events news to avoid this problem. It has links to all the basic weather info we have available on the site, a way to search all of the posted entries and tags/categories that make posts easy to browse by topic or location. The blog uses the TDO mini Forms plugin that can allow our reporters – and our readers – to submit updates from where they are.

Even though we haven’t yet gotten a lot of reader submissions, the blog has been immensely helpful from a news management standpoint. Reporters can file to the blog from their homes, phones or satellite offices, all we have to do it click “publish” in our dashboard. No re-writes are necessary because as the story develops, we can just add news posts. The format also provides an easy way to “sticky” important posts at the top and generates an easy link for the day’s event cancellations.

This easy method of publishing updates weather news has been a great supplement to our info releases and content on Twitter, on our mobile site, text alerts and all of the usual photos and videos we bring out fr every story. The blog’s been doing great traffic on storm days and, from my view, has been a huge burden lifted from the backs of already busy online editors (such as myself).

Because this info has such a short shelf life, I’ve just been deleting all of the old content as soon as the storm coverage ends. We don’t want readers coming back for new weather updates only to find outdated info from last week’s storm. I know that isn’t the greatest option for the sake of SEO and outside linking, but it has made it very easy to essentially launch whole new blogs for each circumstance. I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts on what they would do to prevent link breaks and confusion.

Anyway, that’s been our publishing plan these past two weeks – and if it’s something you think you could use, go for it. WordPress is free, quick to set up and has lot of plugins to enhance user experience.

What has anyone been doing to cover these storms online? What have you been reading?

New AP plan: Taking web traffic from members?

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On August 13, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

The Nieman Lab blog obtained a copy of the AP’s latest plan to preserve it’s aging business model. The name  – “Protect, Point, Pay — An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online” – sort of says it all (for better or for worse).

The plan is to withhold some of it’s content from it’s wire and other means of distribution, instead forcing member sites to link to the content on an AP site. So…the AP is seeking to compete with its member sites for online traffic? Wha?

The AP plan differentiates between “utility” content and “unique” content when deciding what to keep on this centralized site and what to distribute for member use. The AP’s lawyer seemed to define “utility” content as the AP’s usual offerings of traditional news feeds. The “unique” content, I’d think, would be their supplemental interactive graphics, galleries and non-daily news features from AP staff.

While I can appreciate that the AP is at least thinking 21st century on this latest scheme, it begs the question: What exactly are AP members paying for, anyway? Member-owners subscribe to the AP precisely because we want to use this content on our sites specifically to get page views and sell our own ads around it. If AP members have to send that traffic off site – why even pay the huge AP membership fees in the first place? We can give traffic away for free.

In addition to that obvious question, the plan prompts many more alarm bells.

Steve Buttry says the AP seems to be off on the wrong foot from the get-go with this name about the name:

[It] uses two words that reflect the dangerous thinking that plagues way too much of our industry today: The focus on protection of a declining model rather than development of a new, prosperous model and the stubborn denial of all evidence that paid content is not the path to a prosperous model.

Secondly, on this business of unique vs utility content, Buttry and others ask how this distinction will be made and if member-contributed content will be “protected” too. After all, so much of the AP’s state and local feeds seem to be from member papers’ reporting, not that of local AP staffers.

Thirdly – a Nieman commenter asks how will all of this work in terms of search engine optimization? The AP seems to be hoping these outside links will provide all the SEO they’ll need – but these stories aren’t on all the various member sites themselves – how much will the AP content fall in SEO rankings?

I’m sure there’ll be a lot more info out about this in the coming days and weeks and maybe I’ll feel better about it. Right now, despite what their people may say, the AP seems to be looking for a fight with it couldn’t possibly win.

It’s time to cut off support for Digg

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On July 21, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Social Media

Digg.com has been into more shenanigans – prompting this content provider to ask: Have they gone too far? And if so – why do we in online media continue to support them?

On Monday, Mashable confirmed that Digg surreptitiously changed the behavior of its short URLs in a fashion that diverts web traffic intended for content publishers’ sites to Digg.com.

The move has the social web in an uproar – and should have media websites shaking in their boots. It seems that social media site many of us in online news have taken to caring and feeding with the content that makes it so popular has turned on us in a big way.

Digg URLs are/were very popular with users of Twitter and other microblog services wishing to share links. Then, without alerting its users, Digg has made it so those shortened external links no longer go to that great blog entry or article you wanted to share – but rather it links to directly to Digg.com. Do not pass go, do not collect your page views. In short, the Digg URLs are not shortned URLs at all, but rather a Digg-exclusive traffic driver.

Only tonight has Digg at least somewhat rolled back this change to restore previously used Digg URLs to their original destinations. Even so – they intend to go forward with the traffic diversion plan despite the outcry from users.

I suppose we in online news should have seen this coming. It wasn’t the first sign of aggression from Digg.  I’d say Digg has more than proven that it is a direct threat to content publishers – so why are we still supporting it? Oh, you didn’t know you were supporting Digg? Better take a look at your site.

Check out the articles, blogs, photos and any other content you create. Chances are, there is some method for sharing that content online with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and, yes, Digg. Sometimes that is a button that says Digg, other times it may be a service like the ShareThis button you see on this blog.

See, at one time, Digg was a real boon for online publishers. If your story was popular on Digg, the influx of page views coming from its army of users could be staggering. We wanted everything to be on Digg. In fact, we made it as easy as possible to get our content listed on their site by making these links as prominent as possible.

But it turns out in doing all that reaching out – we contributed to the creation of the very bully who’s stealing publishers’ lunch money. Even though it might not make much of a difference,  we in the online news biz need to take back our tiny corners of the web and at least remove Digg from our pages.

Aside: I know I seem like a hypocrite calling for this, being that I haven’t figured out what to do with my own blog yet, but bear with me.

I’ll fight with online naysayers ’til the cows come home about aggregators and Google – but Digg is a credible threat. It’s time to let them go. Besides, if your site is like that of my employer – they are a drop in the bucket compared to Twitter and Facebook these days anyway. Good riddance.

Google has the new “must have” persona

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On May 27, 2009

In Social Media, Surviving

Sorry I’ve not been posting any “real” posts for awhile. Like everyone else in the journalism business, I’ve taken on more work than I can really handle, which makes me dead inside by the time I get home. I have still been scouring my usual haunts for helpful links and news, though, so you’ll see a lot of that.

Anyway, in the forever since I posted, Google has been tinkering with their services – making a new option available that could rival Facebook to be your “must have” social media profile. The Google Profile essentially allows you to control your presence on Google searches. You can enter all the info you’d want to make available when someone Googles you: Your name, your city, what you do and links to all of your social media accounts. When you have it all set up, you’ll get something like this when you search for yourself on Google:

picture-2

If you have a Gmail or Google account, you already have the means to set this up. If not – get a Google account already (they have tons of tools you could be using). When you are signed in to Google, go to where it says My Account. On that page, you can go to edit your profile.

Add a photo, add the cities you’ve lived and what you do for a living (or what you did before you were laid off). Google has a nifty search built in to the profile page that searches for your accounts on tons of social media sites, blogs and other web services. Claim whatever is yours and give it links to anything it is missing – thus making an easy hub for all that online work you’ve been doing.

That’s it! Now you’re easy to find on Google – even if your website has terrible SEO.

A catch-up on recommended reading

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On May 21, 2009

In Recommended Links

These are my recommended links for the past couple of weeks (sorry, I’ve been busy!):

The Diggbar: Friend or foe to news sites?

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On April 13, 2009

In Doomsayers, Social Media

When Digg released its Diggbar a couple of weeks ago, I had a “Where’s the outrage?” post all ready to go. Now I’m cautiously optimistic it isn’t the end of the world (so I’m glad I never hit ‘publish’) – though I’m very much on edge.

Digg, as most people know, is a social bookmarking site and social hub that is an unbeatable traffic driver for news content sites. People share, rate and comment on news stories (among other links) and thus, visit your site when you’re “dugg”.

A couple of weeks ago, Digg launched the Diggbar, which makes it easy for Digg users to shorten and post links to Digg, as well as jump from story to story within the Digg umbrella. The big WTF moment, came when we all noticed that all of Digg’s links no longer went to the original content providers’ sites, but rather linked back to Digg. When you’d click the link on a story on the Digg site, it wouldn’t go to the story directly, but would open the page inside of an iframe at Digg’s site. Oh, crap.

At that time, TechCrunch noted that this would not affect most content providers’ web analytics and advertising displays, though it could impact the original source’s ranking in Comscore, Google and more. This had this news website editor weeping for the death of linkbait – and wondering when we’d begin to discourage our users from Digging our stories.

But maybe I was all worried for nothing. Last week, Digg set out to dispel the rumors of their alleged thievery, assuring we naysayers in the publishing world that their new gadget wouldn’t hurt us in SEO rankings, traffic and analytics. As Digg’s John Quinn put it, “Digg continues to have a symbiotic relationship with content publishers, and we anticipate these ongoing improvements will only enhance publisher traffic as more people discover and share content on Digg.”

Don’t get too relieved just yet. Mashable notes that when perusing Digg, users now have to click twice to see the real link (or three times if they read Digg in an RSS reader). This may lead to even more proliferation of Digg links over original links if readers opt to go the easy route and just use those shortened Digg links in their blogs and social media tools. Also, despite their claims, Digg URLs are showing up in Google and goofing up our SEO.

This has led some content providers to block the Diggbar. Engadget, for once, decided to block it last Friday, stating, “We believe that the work of content creators should be protected and treated as the unique product that it is, and that an end-user’s experience shouldn’t be tainted with a “catch-all” tool which diminishes context.”

Mashable weighed in over the weekend with the pros and cons of the Diggbar. The biggest pro, of course, is increased site traffic from eager Diggers…but it may not outweigh the cost of the impact on SEO. I suggest you take a read before you get fired up and ready to call your programmers.

In short, the jury is out. I expect to see more hubbub as the Diggbar becomes more and more popular. And Digg isn’t alone, Facebook is already redirecting traffic back to itself from your shared links. StumbleUpon is soon to follow. There may be a battle brewing between social media sites and news websites over these new tactics – so stay tuned.

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