For those of you who don't already know, there is a war on between commerce and art. But this war is complicated by the fact that although both sides want to capture the same territory - the Google mainpage - one side is busy pretending that they don't in fact want to do this, but something else entirely.
This is why you will see phrases like "Lady Gaga Goes Nude!" on the AOL homepage, but articles like "The Party Girl Craze - Has Society Gone Too Far?" in Vanity Fair or the New Yorker. But thinking about why we think about things is really just another way of thinking about the same old things, as anyone who has ever read a body-image-mania-related post on gossip blog Jezebel can attest.
There seems to be a fundamental breakdown in the news cycle, or what we more generally refer to as the "content production" cycle nowadays. As a web editor, I've witnessed this firsthand. Without going into too much detail, I'll say that I know what Search Engine Optimization is, and it's my job to make sure that writers know just enough (less than me, but more than the average man on the street)
But when I tell people that I use programs like "Google Trends" in my work, they tend to make faces like they've just seen someone picking their nose in the street. One disgruntled former AOL "Content slave" ends a bitter rant against "The AOL Way" with the chilling words: "Every news site that hopes to survive...thinks about whether their titles will show up in search engines. In the age of Internet news, Google "keywords" matter. …Regular old words, not so much." Miller was sacked from an inhumanly demanding writing gig at AOL for insulting a Hollywood star that AOL had just signed on as a brand ambassador (or so he tries to make it seem.) The fact that Miller didn't even know that said starlet had just signed on as the face of his employer suggests more about him than about AOL. He seemed intent on grabbing the money and making a run for it, and is now pissed off that the money grabbed him. Welcome to America, dude.
Still, let's break his objection down.
1. Traffic. Readers. Viewers. Hits. Tweets. Retweets. Diggs. This is what everyone wants, whether they admit it or not. They want eyeballs to move across their pages and fingers to click on their sponsors' ads. They want data that they can show the big advertisers - 15 million unique visitors a month!! - to justify the astronomical cost of an inch of space at the bottom of their home screen. But how to get these eyeballs? Cater to the hoi polloi? Write for SEO? Dish up Gaga stew and Weiner soup? Actresses undressed?
This is where the breakdown in the news cycle becomes apparent. There was a time - much of history, in fact - when newspapers didn't exist. As literacy expanded, so did the reach of the written word, eventually replacing the town crier. But if modern newspapers really descended (albeit indirectly) from the town crier, then when exactly did they decide to lift themselves so self-seriously above the public interest?
One could argue that the birth of the modern "feature" story - the advent of narrative long-form - suddenly blurred the lines between "writing" and "journalism." This wasn't that long ago - in the early 1900s. Suddenly journalists weren't hacks, they were artistes. And their work had merit that the common man could only guess at.
To a certain extent, these are concerns of ego. Yes, the average person is not that high-brow. The average person probably doesn't want to read 12,000 words on the plight of the Galapagos, interspersed with quotes from everyone from Darwin to Dillard (and since when did this become the only kind of good, serious journalism out there, anyway?)
But the average writer probably overestimates his own abilities, too. There is a reason the New Yorker is still in business, and it has nothing to do with keywords and everything to do with the fact that they are very, very good at what they do. And not many people are. Let's be honest - most people need keywords.
2. Lady Gaga nude. This is really part of point one. As a journalism student, I remember debating ad nauseum what exactly an ethical newspaper owed its audience. Were journalists supposed to print whatever the public wanted? Or were they supposed to interpret and arbitrate the public debate, thereby raising the level of discourse? This debate goes on in newsrooms all the time when discussing how much to cater to SEO, but it's not that different from the same debate that's been going on among journalists for decades now.
The current problems of our form/style/genre are actually the same problems that appeared when journalism first became codified. When ethics, transparency and formal schooling became a more integral part of the profession. I see this change occurring in India today. Ten years ago, journalism was a bottom choice career for people who couldn't do anything else. Now, journalism schools train some of the smartest kids in the country. But when this transition occurred in the United States, newspapers lost a lot of their audience. I suspect that could happen in India, too, but not for several years yet.
To conclude: "In Defense of Keywords:" the SEO debate isn't new, nor are the misconceptions surrounding people who write with keywords in mind (there is a vast amount of territory between AOL and WashPost.com, both of which use keywords as part of their online strategy). But this is the same argument people have been having for years. A lot of journalists have this debate with themselves daily. It seems a bit sloppy to edit the "decline of the new old journalism" into a single quote and attribute it to the Internet.
I don't think that the Internet and journalism are deadly enemies. More like very competitive siblings who can't seem to accept that they each have their own merits and their own admirers. (Of course, journalism feels like the tired, old, irrelevant sibling right now, but...)
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