Content Wise

Does Farmed Content Threaten "Wild-Caught" Journalism?

by Susan 

My Smithsonian pal Beth Py-Lieberman hipped me to a piece from Time magazine about Demand Media, which is a "content farm" that uses the Web's most popular search terms to decide which topics to cover (hence "demand"). The company's thousands of freelance writers--many of them newly unemployed, top-notch journalists--are paid just pennies per word to crank out articles such as "How to remove dents in a hair dryer" and "How do I donate a car in Dallas?" Editing and fact-checking are minimal. The pieces end up on Demand Media's popular sites eHow.com and Livestrong.com, as well as in print outlets such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Demand is valued at $1.3 billion.

The Time piece got me thinking about the debate over farmed vs wild-caught fish, and how journalism/content production seems to be in a similar fix: Sure, the farmed stuff meets the market demand, but it's less tasty, less nutritious, more likely to be tainted, and may threaten wild stock. What happens to "wild-caught" journalism--investigative stories and unexpected, richly reported narratives that take months of research and dedicated work by writer, editors, and fact-checkers--when farmed content floods the market?

Take NYU's nominees for The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade. These stories, many of which you'll recognize as news-breaking and ground-shaking, are the result of curiosity, dedication, and independent thinking. The topics they cover may end up among popular search terms, but they didn't start out that way. And many of the news organizations that published these stories are struggling to survive.

What do you think? Does farmed content threaten wild-caught journalism? Or is there room for both?

Notable Links: March 13, 2010

Five Basic Things Authors Should Do Online: Good advice to help writers (and others!) get started in social media, with links to valuable resources. (52 Projects)

Six Ways to Stop the Social Media Madness: In case you're tempted to overdo it, here are tips on how to control the urge. (Web Worker Daily)

How to use Twitter as an SEO research tool: This video shows how Twitter can help you time the release of your content so it's likely to score high in search results. (SEOMoz)

Potential investors think Pandora could go public: The popular internet radio site has been on the verge of death for 10 years. Now it's the darling of investment bankers. (NYTimes)

Complete list of 2010 National Magazine Award nominees (ASME)

Promote Content With Clear Headlines & Social Links

It's not enough to simply publish content on the Web and hope that the audience will come. You have to work the system.

Writing at Poynter Online, Managing Editor Mark Russell of the Orlando Sentinel shares some strategies that work for his newspaper's site:

1. Write Web-friendly headlines that are readily picked up by search engines and clicked on by searchers. This means using quick, informative, concrete language. Some recent examples from the Sentinel's site:

• Kidnapped teen's dad: 'Watch your children'
• 10 held, 3 at large in cocaine roundup
• Polk residents can recycle tires, phones, ink cartridges

It also means avoiding the clever turns of phrases that may amuse your colleagues but leave the Web audience scratching its collective head. For instance, "Commission to dive in on pool." Oops--that was a rare instance of The Sentinel ignoring its own advice.

2. Submit article links to social recommendation & networking sites. Russell describes two recent cases in which the paper attracted considerable attention for local stories by putting links to them on Facebook.

A Search Box Just For You

Today we're adding a new tool to this blog--see the top of the right side bar. It's a "Swicki," a particularly interesting example of the new breed of customizable search engines, which we wrote about last week here.

We've customized this search engine to zero in on publishing-related sites that we consider particularly useful and on topics in the field that we believe are hot. That makes it especially suited to you, the audience that reads this blog.

But this is a collaborative search engine, which is why it sounds like "wiki". As you use it, you will be "training" it to serve you better. Part of the training is passive: The Swicki pays attention to which search results you click on. But you also can actively register your likes and dislikes by clicking on the various icons that appear to the right of each result.

And this search engine has a "buzz cloud" showing the most popular terms searched by the community of our blog readers. Click on the bigger labels to see results of the more popular searches. We're tapping the wisdom of our specialized crowd here; it doesn't get more Web 2.0 than that.

We hope you find this specialized Swicki so useful that it brings you back to our blog on a regular basis. And we hope that it prompts you to create one to serve your own audience.

Let's Get Vertical (using custom search)

This is a "Swicki."

What's a Swicki? It's an intriguing new variation on the idea of customizable search engines. Before we get to the special wrinkle in Swickis, a word about why publishers should care about customizable search.

Nearly every publisher operates in a narrow niche--covering wine, for example, or travel, or investing, or even dental plans. Publishers have insider knowledge about what topics interest their particular audiences and which Web-based sources are the most authoritative and interesting in their fields. If you could tailor a search engine to comb through only those sites that you specify, you would have a powerful tool to serve the specialized needs of your audience.

Well, there are search engines that you can tailor to your niche in this way. They're free, as long as you can live with some sponsored text ads on the results page. And you can build them right into your site.

One of the simplest versions of these tools is Rollyo ("roll your own" search engine). Yahoo this week unveiled a slightly more tweak-able tool at its Search Builder sub-site. Their motto: "Build a search engine that your customers can't find anywhere else."

Swickis (from San Francisco-based Eurekster.com) up the ante in the custom search engine arms race by adding features that tap the "wisdom of the crowd" and take advantage of other Web 2.0-ish techniques. Users of a Swicki can tag results with their own labels. This enables the Swicki to assemble an archive of categorized searches and to generate a "buzz cloud" of popular results accessible to the entire "crowd."

Swickis also "learn," refining their search strategies in reaction to both active directions from the engine’s creator and passive directions based on user behavior. As the Swicki site puts it, "Swickis harness the collective power of your community."

That's a critical point for publishers--this is your crowd. Unlike the mass audience of the Web at large, your users have real expertise in your niche. So knowing what is popular among their peers is of great value to individual members of your audience. (The generic search engines and the people who run them just don't know your "vertical space" the way you and your users do.)

Any one of these tools offers a relatively easy way to add a branded, "sticky" element to your site. Beyond search, though, smart publishers should think about applying this local customization strategy wherever possible. In other words, identify techniques that work well on the Web at large and adapt them vertically to capitalize on your unique niche.