Andrew Marr and guests wrestle with the Sundays. Photograph: BBC
Print sales are falling, digital audiences are booming and social media appears to be deciding the outcome of world events by algorithm, but every Sunday Andrew Marr, Sophy Ridge et al still spend 15 minutes shuffling double-page spreads and holding up torn sheets of newsprint to the camera.
The TV press review, even today, remains a staple of broadcast news, and not just on Sundays. Every evening and again every morning, on at least two television channels (not to mention radio), every newspaper is pored over and filleted by a panel of guests. As news websites have grown in influence, you now sometimes see a digital journalist invited to join in, and an occasional iPad lying among the broadsheets: but not all the time, and never at the expense of any of the print front pages.
Why is that? Is it because legacy media organisations look to other legacy media organisations, and are slow to recognise new trends? Perhaps: that’s certainly what Jim Waterson, BuzzFeed UK’s political editor, believes. Is it because newspapers, untrammelled by the fairness and balance rules that Ofcom enforce on British broadcasters, can say the things, or launch the campaigns, that Sky and the BBC cannot? Yes, partly: but digital news sites are as free to be partisan as Fleet Street. The biggest reason, I think, for the continued pre-eminence of newspapers in public life is because print front pages have an advantage no other form of media has: rhetoric.
When you are writing headlines for the internet, you have to consider how your article will be disseminated. Newspapers are found in newsagents; to a large extent, digital news stories are found on Google. Only about 30% of readers of web news come through a new organisation’s homepage: all the rest come from search engines or social-media referral. This means that digital news has to show up well on Google, which in turn means that digital news headlines must undergo what’s called “search-engine optimisation” (SEO).
What does that mean? It means that the headline must be written bearing in mind the likely terms a reader might type into Google to find it. Most online readers are not looking on your homepage for the stories they want: they are searching blind, using obvious terms, in a competitive field of news sites who all want their clicks. So, if you have an interview with Barack Obama then somewhere, somehow, the headline has to say BARACK OBAMA. If you’re covering the north London derby, somewhere the headline has to say ARSENAL V TOTTENHAM. If you don’t do that, your piece will come far down on the list of results on Google, and Googlers are not noted for their habit of carefully reading pages of results before clicking.
The disadvantage of this, of course, is that it cramps your headline-writing style. Consider the current upheavals in Westminster. It is still possible to write SEO headlines in the distinctive voice of your organisation: “I’m sick of the Left claiming that Jeremy Corbyn won the election” (Telegraph); “Queen’s speech is DELAYED as May tears up her manifesto to strike a deal with Ian Paisley’s DUP that will ditch new grammar schools and cuts for pensioners but KEEP the target to cut immigration” (Daily Mail); “It Looks Like No One Has Won The UK General Election. WTF Happens Now?” (BuzzFeed). But compare those digital headlines with what’s been appearing on the front pages in the past few days:
These are the kind of phrases – the kind of rhetoric – that cut through. Some of them are old jokes; some of them are new ones; some of them are idioms that may come to encapsulate the crisis (just as the Telegraph’s headline, “In office, but not in power”, resurrects the most memorable of the many assaults made on John Major by his own colleagues in the 1990s). All of them communicate with brief and shattering frankness. And all of them would be SEO disasters: none of those phrases would lead you to a list of search results about the election, and, conversely, nobody typing in “Theresa May hung parliament” or similar into Google would ever find them. Nonetheless, on display at the supermarket, or on the TV, they deliver an instant punch that a five-deck web headline can’t match.
But of course news websites have front pages – or homepages – too. Not all your readers go there, but the ones that do don’t need help from Google to find you. And because you’re free from SEO constraints, there’s more scope for rhetoric: you could almost treat them as though they were newsprint.
Which is exactly, it seems, what BuzzFeed has started doing:
These headlines are short, zingy, SEO-free and – unlike a search on a blank Google homepage – surrounded by photos and furniture that reinforce their message. Although digital, they’re an example of the old journalism, rather than the new. And they’re just the kind of thing that would look good on an iPad at the paper review.
Ten minutes past deadline 
There is a detail point about this that doesn’t really change anything but may help understanding. The search engine is almost certainly looking at the TITLE markup element of the webpage, not the headline as such. It’s much easier to extract the title and use that as an indicator of content than to try and parse the rest of the page to understand the hierarchy of elements. The whole text is indexed of course, but title matching has a greater weight in the search algorithm. The Tribune CMS appears to set the TITLE element to be the same value as the headline but it doesn’t have to be that way – you could have whatever headline you liked as long as the TITLE was SEO-friendly.
A further point is that there is no natural law saying that the TITLE element has to be the most significant one, it’s just something that’s evolved rather than being in the WWW specification or anything like that. It could have equally been the case that everyone settled on putting tags in a subheading and using those, for example.
That’s interesting – so in theory the search terms could throw up headlines that contain none of the search elements, as long as the title did contain them? (I say in theory because not sure the Tribune CMS could ever have the two decoupled)
Yes, what you consider to be (visually) the ‘headline’ is just part of the body text as far as the search engine is concerned; the most heavily-weighted search terms will come from the title. However, when you say “throw up”, that is another matter – because of the prevailing assumption that the title represents the content, the search results listing will show the titles.
Therefore you could have ‘In office, but not in power’ as your headline but would still want something like ‘Theresa May loses majority and faces rivals’ as your title (rather than just a bunch of keywords). Such are the limitations of the prevailing system. But this would probably mean that on other Tribune pages you could have your preferred headline appearing in links and so on without having to mess about. None of it’s ideal but it’s not quite as constrained as your CMS would seem to suggest.
That’s interesting – I might pass this on to our SEO team for comment!
More work for subs, though – you’d be writing two headlines for each article!
That’s fine – we need to be as indispensable as possible these days!