{"id":660,"date":"2007-01-12T11:46:51","date_gmt":"2007-01-12T18:46:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=660"},"modified":"2007-01-12T11:46:51","modified_gmt":"2007-01-12T18:46:51","slug":"writing_for_the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=660","title":{"rendered":"Writing for the machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last April, I wrote<\/a> about how reporters and editors are beginning to craft headlines with an eye to scoring highly in search results. “Where does it end?” I asked. “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?”<\/p>\n

Needless to say, it’s happening. And quickly. Jimmy Guterman points<\/a> to an article<\/a> in today’s Wall Street Journal about how search-engine optimization is increasingly influencing what newspapers publish and how reporters write. After describing how British newspapers are buying AdWords keywords to promote particular articles. the author, Aaron Patrick, writes,<\/p>\n

\n

Many papers are also tailoring their Web sites to attract Google’s news site, which has links to thousands of news articles. The Times of London, owned by New York-based News Corp., is training journalists to write in a way that makes their articles more likely to appear among Google’s unpaid search results. “You make sure key phrases and topic words are embedded in the top paragraph and headlines,” says Zach Leonard, the paper’s digital-media publisher.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All writers have some kind of reader in mind when they put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. In the past, the ideal reader tended to be a human being. In the future, it seems, it will be an algorithm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last April, I wrote about how reporters and editors are beginning to craft headlines with an eye to scoring highly in search results. “Where does it end?” I asked. “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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_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},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-660","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\/660","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=660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}