• by Kendall Allen , March 14, 2011

Many would say that the term "online journalist" is a contradiction -- that one cannot write in today's publishing environment and still call him/herself a journalist, since doing so involves so much selling out to new media that one cannot possibly practice journalistic principles in any legitimate way. Most of these criers would also say that the newspaper business has taken such a lethal hit that if print news is dead -- so is journalism.

Still, I want to believe that as long as journalistic principles, practices, and ethics still live on, we are really just talking about new vehicles and platforms. And therein, we simply must adapt.

So, reading the piece by Karen Stabiner in the Columbia Journalism Review, "CJR Column Mentions the Simpsons," I had one of those "oh God, this is so true" moments. In content and publishing circles and among search types, we often talk of the delicacy of publishing for the reader, the consumer and the spider, all at once.  But, at least for me, these are often conversations about content management systems, dynamic optimization or the back-end co-mingling of content and tech. Unless I am pondering the independent blogger looking to optimize his or her voice online, I'm almost never thinking about the individual writer and the decisions made to service the spider.

If a writer is working for a sanctioned news organization that publishes online, I suppose we quietly assume it's someone else's job to make sure his or her editorial is read. And as someone who's spent a lot of time thinking about and practicing search, I get this -- and have always been OK with it, accepting that kind of tuning as part of putting out today's publishing.  

Here's what Stabiner writes:

"Search engine optimization-SEO to its close friends-is the process by which savvy websters customize a headline, a lede, and in perfervid cases, the text of an article, to improve its chances of appearing at the pinnacle of the Internet's Mount Everest-the top of the first screen of a Google search.

The goal is traffic, which, the theory goes, will bring advertising revenue. Part of the reason AOL was willing to pay $315 million for The Huffington Post, for example, was HuffPo's extremely sophisticated SEO strategy, which guarantees an endless flood of traffic."

But, if you take a close and honest look, the new reality of dually having to consider both editiorial and search optimization -- even for those with feet to the street, fingers to the keyboard - poses great internal conflict. The title of this article -- "CJR Column Mentions The Simpsons" -- refers to the blatant bot-baiting that has gone on to earn search discoverability. While this title mocks it, there are real examples and real disgust among practicing journalists. The piece quotes The WashingtonPost's Gene Weingarten, who recently wrote a column headlined "Gene Weingarten column mentions Lady Gaga." Or as he frames it in the Stabiner piece:

"'SEO is all part of a general degradation of our culture, in which we have replaced spontaneity with script, at the expense of growth," he said. "It's an extension of our MP3 culture, where we no longer seek surprise. We listen to music we already know. Same with SEO. People find only what they are looking for. They are denied the sort of surprise a newspaper page delivers.'"

Having grown up in a newsman's household and gone on to pursue my own paths through magazine journalism, then digital publishing and later other territory -- in fact including search -- I've long recognized the frictions within and around news and publishing enterprise. But, in looking at it plainly, the coming together of edit and SEO is a divisive union.

"On the surface, SEO is merely as strange and suspect and inevitable as cold type was to people who knew how to read hot type upside down and backwards," Stabiner writes. "But this step in the media revolution has polarized members of the fourth estate in a way that typesetting never could, because it all but erases the line between editorial and publishing. Success-what used to be called circulation, now eyeballs-often resides in lowest-common-denominator language."

It was kind of eye-opening to spend some time thinking about this on a more individual basis. As a journalist writing today, you must have a stance on SEO, it seems. Among all of your ethical considerations, if you plan to make a living writing today, this -- oddly but truly -- becomes one of them.