wake up and smell the copy
Posted in journalism on Jan 13th, 2011
Been a while, etc. Moved to write by this particular piece of twattery by the BBC. Birds dying, you say? Binge drinking you say? That sounds like a story combining recent bizarre avian trends with the warm glow of Puritan superiority. But wait, what’s this? The full story reveals that the birds died from (presumably [...]
Posted in journalism, marketing, online journalism on Mar 13th, 2010
Noun: pseudo news; Fact x Importance / SEO
Posted in internet, marketing, online journalism on Mar 12th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in marketing, online journalism, work on Feb 25th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in internet, journalism, online journalism on Dec 8th, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in online journalism on Aug 1st, 2008
As regular reader(s) will know, I read BBC News Online a fair bit. Even so, I’ve never noticed this before. I’m slightly embarrassed that it’s in such a story of prurient interest, but there you go. So, searching the Beeb for Newstracker reveals that, at least in theory, this has been running since 2004. It’s [...]
Posted in online journalism on Nov 14th, 2007
Now I’m as partial to the odd cheeky piece of optimisation as the next digital marketing agency-based journalist, but the lengths to which some news feeds are being stretched is hilarious. Kwik-Fit Insurance News for example, which a colleague alerted me to earlier this week. So dogged is their determination to rank highly for ‘women’s [...]
Posted in blog, online journalism on Nov 6th, 2007
I recently wrote this article for the Press Gazette; some basic SEO tips for journalists. It’s nice to think that I might be developing a reputation for knowing what I’m talking about, but in fact the deputy editor found me through this blog. I find that hugely encouraging. It’s not often as a journalist that [...]
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