I’m fascinated by this stuff, because it’s shit, but also because if Google News is going to allow it it drives home a depressing realisation: from day one, Charlie and I could have put all our ‘journalist’ crap aside and just rewritten optimised press releases as news – don’t think nobody wanted us to. We’d have hated ourselves and gained even fewer readers, but clearly they’re not the point.

So I’ve been thinking more about exactly why companies want psews on their websites. Make no mistake that it’s all about the optimised links, but a quick chat with @randipdhesi helped me better understand what’s going on. They’re not getting link equity from Google News, of course, but they are getting a degree of traffic, and there’s always the chance that people linking to the news story will – like I did – forget to add a no follow.

Linking 101

By omitting this, and thus conferring its (limited) authority to another site through a link, Hackbash is suggesting to Google that it rank that site more highly for search terms similar to the anchor text used. By way of an example, I know of a jolly good B&B. At the time of writing, search results for that exact term all relate to a pub in Hampshire. Within a day or two, now I’ve written that, the B&B closer to my heart should rank alongside it.

So that’s part of it, although of course you can’t control the text with which people link to your site*. But third-party sites that link to yours confer a more general sort of authority on it, and by careful management of links within the receiving site this ‘Googlejuice’ can be distributed in a controlled fashion.

By ensuring that any part of the site that attracts inbound links contains only optimised links that point to the site’s own product landing pages, a company can channel some of its incoming link love to its products. This helps them rank more highly when people search in Google for product-related terms. Like prestige car hire, commercial vehicle hire or fucking car lights.

Randip makes the point that a newsfeed is particularly attractive, because there’s no shortage of third-party sites who’ll syndicate, or simply rip off its content. In some cases the links stay intact, resulting in an optimised link to a product page from a third-party: the best of all worlds.

Tamsin’s written on the iCrossing blog about how Google’s useless in a crisis. To an extent that’s unsurprising; something as fast moving and serious as the Chilean earthquake is always going to generate a challenging amount of information and, as Tamsin says, much of this came via sources created specifically for the job. Google’s search algorithm wasn’t designed to reach an instant value judgement, and yet increasingly it needs to.

But news aggregation relates to established and ongoing sources, and as such it’s an area where a search engine has the time to fettle and refine its service. By now, Google News should be shit-hot. It’s tempting to say it’s half-way there.

* Search agencies, including iCrossing, do ask, and some webmasters are happy to oblige.

We use Google News among our sources. I’ve written before of my concerns regarding its apparent lack of judgement, but I still find it useful – particularly its new(ish) custom section feature.

Recently its results have begun to include the peculiarly car-headlight-bulb-focused Autobulbs Direct News, providing such fetishistic takes on motoring news as:

Bentley launches new vehicle, with gloss black finished car light casings

and

Car lights of Spyker supercars to be fitted in Coventry (where, in fact, the whole cars are to be assembled).

We’ve seen this kind of deal before: take a press release, rewrite it, crowbar in the term you’re trying to optimise for, publish and submit to Google News. Even so, a recent story went too far, mis-attributing a focus on headlights to a Virgin Money spokesman:

[Grant Bather] suggested that this could include cracked car lights or other damage caused in a traffic accident or claims that result from breakdowns or theft.

This is just naughty. There’s no mention of headlights in Bather’s quotes, or indeed anywhere else in the Virgin release.

Taken in isolation, tucked away in a news feed that’s written for Google, perhaps this kind of search-term loading hardly matters, but it depresses me all the same. I expected Google to become more wise than it was in 2007 to the quality of the news it aggregates.

Back then, in a few months of optimism, it was tempting for Charlie and I to believe that we were part of a potential new direction for journalism. Like us, we assumed, other journalists would want to maintain decent standards when writing news for the websites of corporate clients, and that Google would help by favouring those who bothered.

For me, our two motoring news feeds are all that remains of that belief.

Sometimes the result is conveniently brief and fact-packed; at other times it’s just wonderfully bonkers:

Anyway, as editor Steve Herrmann explained in November, the BBC is finally embracing some basic SEO practices in a bid to “make it easier to find our stories if you are somewhere else”. God help the competition.

Steve’s post is entirely reasonable, of course, as is the corporation’s move. The examples he highlights are all cases where the longer headline is useful, or at least inoffensive, but I wondered when I read it how it would play out in practice.

To be honest, I’d forgotten all about it until last night, when I discovered a story where the new practice jarred: “Man charged over James Murray Belfast balcony death”. It’s not hateful, but it’s an example of what happens when keywords make their presence felt.

Interestingly, the BBC’s URL structure still doesn’t include keywords. Introducing them would also help the stories rank, and nobody would ever notice or care.

Journochlophobia – fear of crowd-sourcing

Handolio introduced me to ‘enochlophobia’ in this rather fine post about Larmer Tree on Living.

Perhaps he was trying to beat his own record?

So, how will we pay for journalism?

There’s little doubt in my mind that it must be paid for; that is, that there’s always going to be a need for professional journalists with the freedom and security to investigate, uncover and report.

If ad revenue is declining publishers must, as Antony rightly points out, “look beyond advertising for revenue”, but where is this revenue? Can we charge for content? That’s been tried with limited success: there’s so much content around that you have to have something special or unique before people will pay to see it.

What alternative models does that leave? Nobody seems to know.

Cut out the middleman?

I used to wonder, based on our experimentation at iCrossing, whether the publisher was becoming redundant, and what the ramifications of this would be.

Rather than write for a publisher – who maintains the healthy distance between editorial process and the commercial interests of the advertiser – we’re writing directly for the advertiser. Some would argue – as Dave Lee has – that this inherently makes all of our content advertising, but I’d strongly disagree. With a proper editorial process, and management that is prepared to defend it when there’s a potential conflict of interests, it is possible to produce objective and useful, reader-first news.

Is this enough, though? The scope of what we can do is limited, at least indirectly, by the commercial concerns of the companies funding our work.

Where’s the commercial interest, say, for any of iCrossing’s clients to fund an investigation into possible corruption within the police force, or government? What kind of company would have that remit, and how seriously would anyone take the results? As how important would journalism’s role in Watergate be remembered if, for example, Woodward and Bernstein’s Washington Post investigation had been a Wash ‘n’ Go investigation?

And there’s another vital concern: good journalism needs protection. What everyday company is ever going to offer a journalist the resources and support afforded by a publisher, with its experience, influence and – let’s face it – media lawyers? In my recent experience, few firms understand the role, purpose, needs or constraints of journalism. They aren’t going to stick their neck out for it.

Is what the journalists at iCrossing do a viable model for journalism’s future, then?

Yes and no. I’m realising that despite our idealism and ambitions, journalism directly-funded by commercial concerns is perhaps among the future profession’s lowest rungs, and there need to be many more above it. And it’s funding the higher rungs that presents the real challenge.

I like the way it tells you how many news sources have included the same quote – kind of shows up the news recycling process/reliance on PR.

Although rather than fiddle about with features like this, it might be better if Google News kicked out press release and spam news outlets.

It’s troubling Charlie and me. Over a coffee we sat talking it over, and realised that we needed to write down some basic rules that, if we all followed them, would help us get news stories right every time. This is what we came up with:

1) Find the source – whatever the story, unless you’re breaking it, find out where it originated.
2) Understand and verify – now you’ve found the original story, analyse it and make sure you properly understand. Check that everyone else has got the story right, speaking to the source if you’re in any doubt.
3) Question – Check every fact. Make sure claims stack up. Attribute opinions and assertions to their owners – never repeat them in the publication’s voice.
4) Counterpoint – If the story is contentious, find someone to debate or debunk it. If it sounds plausible, still find someone qualified to comment – they may strengthen it, or pick up holes you didn’t spot.
5) Explain - Once you have a story you understand and that you’ve properly probed, you’re ready to explain it to your readers. This is where you start writing. Don’t forget links to supporting information – it’s the one of the biggest advantages of writing online.

I should point out that neither Charlie or I studied journalism. Some of you lot did: what have we missed? I know these are elementary, but are they all bollocks?