hackbash

Noun: pseudo news; Fact x Importance / SEO

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I don’t know. Seems I’m still feeling pissy about the polluting effect of SEO on content. While Google News seems to have temporarily extinguished Autobulbs Direct, a host of similar sites are cropping up in its results, blabbering on about how the weather could delay prestige car hire customers (people) or how British commercial vehicle [...]

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At work, we’re writing a couple of motoring news feeds for an insurance client. It’s not journalism red in tooth and claw, but they’re nice people and we quite enjoy trying to give them a couple of properly researched, written and edited news stories every day. To their credit, that’s what they want. We use [...]

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@sussex_news, the Twitter feed for the Sussex newsroom at Heart Radio, has a habit of using individual tweets to flag more than one story. Sometimes the result is conveniently brief and fact-packed; at other times it’s just wonderfully bonkers:

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought that the BBC News website could do with a lift in the search engines. After all, the site just never appears in the search results and hardly seems to get any traffic. Anyway, as editor Steve Herrmann explained in November, the BBC is finally embracing some [...]

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Journochlophobia – fear of crowd-sourcing Handolio introduced me to ‘enochlophobia’ in this rather fine post about Larmer Tree on Living.

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Perhaps he was trying to beat his own record?

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An interesting post on Antony’s blog has drawn me into a thread about the commercials behind journalism. In essence, Roy Greenslade has challenged Philip M Stone’s “heretical thought” that papers return to print-first publishing, but he doesn’t suggest an alternative revenue model. Antony notes iCrossing’s experiments with new models of journalism. Meanwhile, Paul Bradshaw (in [...]

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Maybe I’m slow on this – but has anyone else noticed this ‘highlighted quote’ feature before at the top of Google News results? (please excuse the poor reproduction – you get the idea). I like the way it tells you how many news sources have included the same quote – kind of shows up the [...]

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I’ve been plagued of late by the creeping realisation that we’re a department of between four and six journalists, depending how you count it, in a company where 114-116 people aren’t journalists. Lately, we’ve been so busy trying to shore up our position that I wonder if we’ve taken our eyes off our craft just [...]

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