E-Media Tidbits

Sylvia Westenbroek, via Flickr (Creative Commons license) The shovel: A great tool, but not for the job of online publishing.

My earlier post about the myriad problems that shovelware headlines can cause sparked an interesting and diverse discussion in the comments.

Granted, writing online-friendly heads is an extra step. In most newsrooms, the last thing you want to do is burden news staff with yet another task. But sometimes the benefits handsomely repay that effort -- and the effort often ends up being not very onerous after all, once people get used to it and see the benefits. I know no one likes change, but fundamentally the news business is about keeping up with changes, right?

In the most recent comment on that thread, reader Christine Masters (sorry, her profile doesn't indicate where she works or how to contact her) voiced what I thought was a very reasonable solution to news organizations wrestling with print/online headline optimization.

She wrote: "At a newspaper where I worked previously, we created a system where the editorial software used by the newsroom had fields for print elements (headline, subhead, body, etc.) and also Web elements.

"So, the reporter, copy editors, and section editors could write Web-friendly elements during the editing process. This adds perhaps seconds to a newsroom employee's workload, and saves an online producer hours of effort at the end of the process. [emphasis added] It also ensures that these headlines are edited, and by people who know most about the topic and story (rather than by an online producer who may not be knowledgeable on the subject).

"Also, we didn't make the Web elements mandatory. If the Web element was filled in, it would be sent to the Web site in our export script. If the Web element was not filled in, our exporter would take the print element instead."

Sounds reasonable to me! Yes, it's asking all newsroom staff to make a minor change in their filing or editing routine -- but that change isn't 100% mandatory. However the benefits to readers and to the news organization are significant: Growing the audience and enhancing engagement (which supports any media business model), while also making news content more accessible and usable to feed and mobile audiences.

Even better, the approach Masters describes doesn't shoulder one poor Web producer with having to read the day's stories and come up with appropriate online headlines for all of them on the fly in the middle of the night. (That, by the way, seems to be the only option the Boulder, CO Daily Camera sees for writing online-friendly heads, according to a comment left in that thread by the Camera's online editor.)

But why not put both types of heads to work online? Yes, that is entirely possible -- and even desirable.

Reader Donn Friedman commented: "Don't forget one of the functions of the Web site is viral marketing of the news. Someone sees a story in print and wants to use the Web site to share it. They go to the Web site and can't find it because it has a new, improved headline.

"At the least the print headline needs to be in the meta data [emphasis added] so the story can be found and shared. So you need layers of info including the print headline, an improved Web headline, an abstract. All this begins with information architecture at the content creator level not at a repurposing desk."

I like that too. Seems like an elegant solution that would yield good results from both in-site and external search engines, and also serve online audiences at all levels of ability and using any net-connected device.