{"id":330,"date":"2006-04-10T23:42:23","date_gmt":"2006-04-11T05:42:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=330"},"modified":"2006-04-10T23:42:23","modified_gmt":"2006-04-11T05:42:23","slug":"machine_hed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=330","title":{"rendered":"Machine hed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeff Jarvis sees nothing wrong with journalists kowtowing to search engines and their idiot-savant algorithms. Writing in response to Steve Lohr’s article<\/a> on how reporters and editors are beginning to craft headlines with an eye to scoring highly in search results, Jarvis defends<\/a> “search-engine optimization,” or SEO, as a journalistic goal:<\/p>\n

\n

The fear about SEO is that it dumbs-down or blunts-up the presentation of content to [sic] a search engine can understand what a story is about and lead readers interested in that topic to it. But I\u2019m not so sure that simplicity, directness, and bluntness are so bad. How often have you read headlines and the first halves of overwritten newspaper and magazine stories wondering what the hell they are about? A simple summary of a story with clear labeling of its topics are [sic] good for humans, too. I\u2019d love it if every story [sic] \u2014 online and in print \u2014 told me what the story is about so I can decide whether I want to spend my time reading it. After all, that used to be the real value of headlines before they became another stage for showing off.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After slogging through that paragraph, one begins to understand Jarvis’s fondness for machine readers. He writes prose that only a search engine could love.<\/p>\n

(Yes, yes, I know: Elitism is infinitely worse than philistinism. Copy-editing is for dinosaurs. Confused syntax is a sign of authenticity. Believe me: I’m trying to reeducate myself.)<\/p>\n

It’s true that most headlines are fairly utilitarian things, meant to telegraph the thrust of an article and fit more or less elegantly the allotted space. And you wouldn’t want to know the amount of money that’s been spent researching how headlines grab, or lose, the attention of readers. (Bottom line: “Seven hot sex tips” is pretty hard to beat.) All things considered, SEO-ing headlines may not seem like that big a deal.<\/p>\n

But it is. “In newspapers and magazines,” writes Lohr, “section titles and headlines are distilled nuggets of human brainwork, tapping context and culture.” That may sound pretentious, but it also happens to be true. If Jarvis actually believes that “clear labeling” is the be-all and end-all of headlines, then I feel bad for him. He’s missing out on all the wit and wisdom that, at their best, headline writers can compress into just four or five words. Writing for a machine is worse than a guarantee of blandness. For a writer, it’s a moral fault.<\/p>\n

Where does it end? Certainly not with headlines. Search engines don’t stop there, so why should journalists? Why not stuff the first couple of paragraphs with search-engine-friendly terms? Hell, why not just gin up your own algorithm for giving stories an SEO tweak before they run? That wouldn’t just get you higher rankings. It would also, no doubt, give your stories greater “simplicity, directness, and bluntness.” And once you’ve got that down, why not cobble together another algorithm to decide what stories you should write in the first place? Why devote scarce resources to a piece that will end up being invisible to search engines? That’s the thing about optimization: Once you start, it’s hard to stop.<\/p>\n

“Journalism is literature in a hurry,” said Matthew Arnold. Which is where I’ll stop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeff Jarvis sees nothing wrong with journalists kowtowing to search engines and their idiot-savant algorithms. Writing in response to Steve Lohr’s article on how reporters and editors are beginning to craft headlines with an eye to scoring highly in search results, Jarvis defends “search-engine optimization,” or SEO, as a journalistic goal: The fear about SEO […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}