Journalism is on the ropes. The industry is facing heavy pressure and challenges from a number of sources in light of the recession, mainly an oversaturation of bloggers offering their own opinions on stories and events to the loss of revenue generated by newsstand prices. Rupert Murdoch is trying to counteract this by charging people a fee to read content from his News Corporation’s websites in the near future. “Content is not just the king, it is the emperor,” he has been recently quoted as saying, and he his hoping that his regular readership will pay to read online content provided by his newspapers. But charging for online content will be a massive gamble, and Murdoch will unwittingly be the barometer for other websites across the globe. Yes, people want to read quality content but the watering hole they are looking for first and foremost is information. Information which they can quickly access through free, online sources – though Google News is admittedly starting to restrict its operations.

This isn’t a post solely about journalism, and you mustn’t feel I am going off on a tangent. I am writing this in response to the news that the BBC is incorporating SEO into all of its news stories. Although the industry is up in the air, the future of journalism does have one certainty, and that is that journalistic writing will go hand in hand with search engine optimisation.

I bumped into an old colleague last month who I used to work with at Trinity Mirror, and he has no doubt that publishing houses will have to adopt search engine optimization moving forward. In fact, he comments, a prominent German newspaper already utilises SEO broadly in its journalism, scouring for the most viewed stories of the day before incorporating SEO into their reports to get noticed by the online readership. Without it, news websites will simply shrivel up and die in a graveyard of misinformed bloggers and teenagers.

One of the most prominent examples of this was the demise of Liverpool.com. For most of 2008 and the start of 2009, I freelanced for Liverpool.com to help cover the Capital of Culture year. Also operating as a free regional magazine, Liverpool.com was making a, albeit slight, profit and the readership was steadily growing. Sadly, in lieu of the recession, the ropes were cut in March last year and the site is now a shell of its former self, feeding off old stories not deemed suitable or newsworthy enough for The Echo or Daily Post.

I have no doubt in my mind that Liverpool.com would have had a longer stay of execution had local SEO been incorporated into the site, and would had benefitted from the extra growth boost that would have provided. By no means was Liverpool.com a long-term project, but I am certain that local SEO – or even a wider, more national SEO campaign – would have brought in a significant traffic boost, making it a success.

My old tutor at ContentETC, Richard Sharpe, is optimistic about the future, citing content as the saviour. By putting the emphasis on good, quality content as the foundation of next-generation journalism, he feels that people will search out exclusives, original writing and well-researched copy. Content is indeed king as Murdoch points out, but search engine optimisation is the crown sitting atop his head, making him visible to all.

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