In his latest weekly post for Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles muses about the latent recognition by Associated Press of the term website (formerly Web site), then argues students shouldn't be focusing on AP style. Instead, he suggests, search engine optimization would be far more useful. It would help link content to an audience, so it would be ultimately more important than understanding intricacies of news agency language and grammar style. To those who suggest students learn both, Niles correctly points out that the two aren't always compatible. SEO is better with full names and phrasing that often prefers brevity over full-fledged passages. The post explores one of the tensions in today's newsrooms: How to publish across platforms without reworking content extensively. A newspaper story isn't necessarily SEO-friendly, and the SEO-friendly Web file Niles notes that algorithms are bending over time to be more reader-friendly, so the notion that it's a matter of writing for machines isn't apt. Niles is right about another point: There are no SEO textbooks out there. Lots of tips, but no books. At the World Media Summit in Beijing, the world's largest press baron and the world's largest wire service leader voiced the same message about the end of free content online. Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. made clear: A paywall is coming. And Rob Curley of the Associated Press sent the signal: Micropayments will be the approach. Murdoch's speech sound bite was the most provocative: ""The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph." But Curley was no shrinking violet: "We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it." |
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