We are entering an age where publishers are becoming "Digital Windsocks", following the audience and the advertising revenue, damaging reputations and quality of content quality in the wake.
The role of a journalist is evolving to include a greater understanding of search engine optimisation and interpreting data, but in the effort to appeal to search engines, is quality journalism suffering?
Yesterday, an Association of Online Publishers (AOP) forum brought together an expert panel to examine the editorial impact of SEO and to look at what the future for news production might be.
Andrew Currah, lecturer for Reuters Institute of Journalism at Oxford University, and author of 'What's Happening to Our News', which examines the changing business of journalism in the digital age, introduced the concept of a Digital Windsock.
Currah said now there is a focus to accumulate attention around news to build advertising revenue. Publishers are chasing clicks, but have no clear sense of how much the digital audience is worth or when digital revenues will recoup the costs of multimedia integration.
According to recent trends, most commercial news website traffic enters through a "side door" of search results and RSS feeds, leaving the site within a matter of minutes.
In the UK, 30% of time spent online is on 10 URLs or less, none of these are commercial news sites.
During his research Currah found that new forms of reading are emerging. People now power browse, looking horizontally through titles and a few lines down the left side of the content, scouring for anything of interest, before moving on.
He also found that publishers are now frequently looking towards experimental methods to take advantage of the user "clickstream" some even turning to neuroscience to measure the subconscious foundations of the web user.
Publishers at the Guardian, Al-jazeera and the Times have recently experimented with an open-source approach to their websites, allowing the user to control and shape the content they want.
However, Currah warns of a dark side to the innovation and the pursuit of clicks, such as what happens to quality when content is shaped for the digital crowd, will new techniques like SEO lead to softening of the news agenda and will publishers continue to funnel resources into keywords instead of newsbreaking content?
The evidence is already apparent that the news agenda is as soft as butter. Scanning the 'Most Popular/Most Read' story lists from national news websites, it becomes clear that reader attention is concentrated around quirky content, clicks can give a good indication of audience interest and boredom, and the immediacy of clickstream is starting impact editorial decision making.
Currah predicts that the future will see a division between the Windsocks and The Anchors; those handful of publishers able to resist lure of clickstream.
However, it is certain that navigating the clickstream whilst maintaining editorial standards will require some sort of economic shelter, and it's inevitable that Anchor publishers will provide this by using a mix of paid-for-content and advertising revenue.
It's a combination that works, in my opinion, and I don't think the Windsock concept is totally lost on the readers themselves. Those wanting unbiased, quality news content will pay for it if necessary, leaving the quirkiness and frivolous to those that don't charge.
The question here seems to be, is digital journalism purely a commercial venture? and yes while sites are becoming more financially savvy in terms of advertising revenue (which from a business perspective is a good thing) it is wrong to think the quality of editorial is simply playing to advertisers. If a site isn't generating an effective CTR believe me when I say advertisers won't be back. Thus the need for effective insight.
As the technology curve sweeps ever further the advancement of new media is a necessity rather than a luxury. Consumers now demand content in the right context and hyper targeted ads / effective creative executions will and do work.
Certainly on my own sites IGN Entertainment, we are a purely online entity, no traditional media supporting or guiding us, and my editorial team here are some of the best writers I have ever had the privilege to work with. From a commercial perspective we work together to deliver campaigns that take advantage rather than manipulate the editorial..and long may it continue
Dan Leahul
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Member since: 10 Sep 2008
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