Image Credit: Missha on Flickr

Bad news. Good news?

Every August or September, Google seem to enjoy shaking everything around a little.*

In the last few weeks there has been a significant change to their organic search results algorithm – which basically means that a single domain can be returned multiple times for a keyword search on the first page. Malcolm Coles wrote about this last week.

And then at the top of the search engine result pages (or SERPs, if you speak in acronyms), there will be an equally severe adjustment in their paid search policy. Basically, Google used to protect brands by forbidding advertisers to use trademarked terms within their ad copies. Not anymore. From 14 September, resellers in the UK, Ireland and Canada will be able to use brand terms (iPhone, Easyjet, Nike and so on) in their adverts, pushing up their quality score, bringing down CPCs (costs per click) and generally making the whole thing much more competitive. There is a Net Media Planet blog on this (disclaimer – I work there) – if you want a little more detail.

Treated separately, both of these stories are interesting, newsworthy and will have consequences for advertisers and site traffic. Taken together, they add up to something of a little more.

Control of their trademarks gone, brands will lose out to resellers in the paid search listings. But if they do see their amount of paid search traffic drop, though, they will have the opportunity to claw it back by dominating the organic results. Google have taken with one hand and given back with the other.

Some thoughts:

• Paid search on profitable keywords/brands will become much more competitive and brands might well see sales impacted
• SEO Managers working for big brands will have the opportunity to dominate the first page of the organic search results for important keywords
• The user search experience might be affected. I suspect Google anticipate that the paid search results will compensate for the lack of variety further down the page. Will it?

So, these are a few of the changes to look forward to in the next few months. I’m sure that SEO’s will already be finding ways around these changes (they always do).

And, in the meantime, here’s a video about what might be coming next. I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

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* Of course, Google is always changing, fiddling, tweaking and rattling about their algorithms. At certain times, though, their changes are more significant. See this article on their recent Mayday Change, and another on the famous Florida Update, back in the day.

image credit: taijofj on Flickr

Interviewing and ethics

“In The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), [Janet] Malcolm described the inevitable betrayal involved in the journalist-subject encounter; the subject will regress like a patient in psychoanalysis, childishly trusting their questioner, only to discover that the journalist is not a compassionate listener but a professional with an agenda and a story to construct.

Thus, according to the book’s oft-quoted opening: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

(Taken from The Journalist and the Biographer – Sydney Morning Herald)

Frost Nixon

This snippet of the Nixon interviews with David Frost in 1977 (sorry – it can’t be embedded – you have to click on that link) encapsulates the point perfectly. It shows Frost poised, concentrating. Head down a touch, eyes up. Meanwhile Nixon’s body language is defeatist: shoulders thrown back, head bobbing about, hands outstretched before him.

It’s a fascinating snapshot of the journalist at work.

Interviewing as an art

Interviewing is a learned art as much as a natural-born skill. I thought I’d add some examples below of encounters – some famous, some not – that have stuck in my mind.

All of these interviews throw up different challenges. Some have more successful outcomes than others.

1. David Dimbleby runs into a grumpy Gore Vidal on the night of Obama’s presidential victory in 2008.

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2. Devina McCall in caught wretchedly in a clash of style – between pop tv and rock music in this interview with James Dean Bradfield.

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3. Al Capp takes on John Lennon at his Bed-In in Montreal

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4. Jeremy Paxman interviews George Galloway on election night 2005 – and goes straight for the throat

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5. Trouble between interviewees – a famous incident between Gore Vidal and William Buckley in 1968

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6. And back to Lennon again. This is an old favourite and great work of art: a 14 year-old Beatle fan meets Lennon at around the same time as the Al Capp incident

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(Image: Prebends Bridge in Durham, by BigBadsWorld on Flickr)

Much maligned: media studies.

One week and one day before 11 September 2001, Michael Hann, who is now Film and Music Editor at the Guardian, wrote a feature: Media studies? Do yourself a favour – forget it.

The best part of a decade on, it’s interesting to have a look back at this. On job prospects, he said:

This autumn, students around the country will enrol for undergraduate journalism degrees, probably imagining that their three years of study will place them in the forefront of those students seeking jobs in the media when they graduate…

…many will face disappointment. Undergraduate journalism degrees are a new creation in this country. Even a decade ago, it was accepted that studying journalism as a student meant one of two things: either the pre-entry courses run by the bodies that oversee journalists’ training, or one of the postgraduate courses run by a number of institutions, headed by the Oxbridge of journalism: the one-year courses at City and Cardiff universities.

It’s hard not to claim cause and effect, when, in the last few weeks alone, there’s been a blog post by Lara O’Reilly on the scarcity of opportunities for recent grads and another on Journalism.co.uk which runs to similar lines by Joseph Stashko.

So maybe Hann was right? Or maybe not. Listen to this:

In their desire to gets bums on seats and fees in accounts, too many colleges and universities are running courses that do not provide students, even after three years, with the skills they need to get a job. Worse, because they need the money the students generate, they fail to identify students who are simply not good enough to work in journalism and warn them of their shortcomings. Why would anyone do a journalism degree if they thought they would not get a job at the end of it? They would not. But don’t tell them that: we might lose the cash.

Every editor who takes work experience students has had the same experience: a student in the final year of a journalism degree who will never get a job. I have seen students who, literally, could not string a sentence together. Not one of their tutors had ever sat down with them and explained the bitter facts of life: you can’t write, can’t sub, can’t interview, won’t ring round – you’re unemployable in journalism.

People like that have always wanted to be journalists and they have always been disappointed. The difference now is that they waste three years of their lives and thousands of pounds before they find out. And course tutors collude in it.

This point is more difficult to square – and a decade on Hann will probably have to concede that this was an unfair caricature. Those starting off in journalism today might not be any more or less talented than those a decade ago, but they are certainly much better prepared.

Student media. (c.2001)

Around the same time that Hann was writing his piece, I was about to start my degree at Durham. It was a small, odd place in comparison to the county that I had just left. All crooked houses, towering cathedrals, stone bridges and cobbled streets. After a bit I started writing for Palatinate, the student newspaper – which at the time was about all the early journalism training that we were expected to get.

@rebeccats might well back me up on this, but I confess that we weren’t especially good. None of us had had any proper training in how to give a news story shape; half of the features were indulgent and wore on like a church sermon and the whole thing – a broadsheet paper with accompanying arts supplement – was cobbled together on a doddery Mac by a group of aspiring writers who had all of the design nous of a gibbon.

If you look at student media a decade on, the landscape has changed entirely. Students like Joseph Stashko (who is a journalism student at UCLan) are running hyperlocal sites such as Blog Preston in their spare time. Josh Halliday – who did his BA at Sunderland – has blogged his way to a trainee job with the Guardian, and up at Birmingham City University, Paul Bradshaw has set up a course which is so far in front of the rest of the industry that a good chunk of the media travels up their JeeCamp Unconference each year to see what might be happening next.

While this all might be reflective of a rather jumbled up industry, it is far more democratic than how it used to be. A decade after Hann’s article and journalism grads are unquestionably better trained and prepared to enter the industry than they were before. Good students are now fully NCTJ trained and in addition they know about design, they know about coding, they know about data and they have the tools – both hardware and software – to get the job done quickly and sometimes brilliantly.

During our degrees we didn’t have any of this training. We just learnt in public by occasionally making a hash of things, knowing that we’d have to go off and do a postgraduate course at some point in the future. With Halliday’s appointment – the kind of position that you’d have expected to go to a breezy-bequiffed English Lit or History grad back in the early 2000s – it’s clear that nowadays the industry is taking journalism undergraduate degrees seriously.

(Have a look at Paul Bradshaw’s list of recent successful grads at the bottom of this post to see more examples of top jobs going to grduating journalism students).

One Blair, one Bush, one photo

One incident from my time on Palatinate sticks in my mind particularly. It was in about 2003, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, when President George W. Bush arrived to visit Tony Blair at his Sedgefield home. Bush ate a pub lunch while surrounded by a scrum of security and then disappeared off the sky in his helicopter.

The most we managed on the event was a grainy photograph at 150 paces and a short news piece. I wonder how that story would have been reported now with trained bloggers and teams of student journalists: Twitter, AudioBoo, Posterous and all the rest of it. It’s would be a good measure of how student reporting has moved on.

But where are the jobs? There has been a 24% increase in applicants for journalism courses over the last year and the industry is being squeezed. You can’t help get the feeling that trying to get all the journalism graduates into relevant jobs is like trying to jam an elephant into a thimble.  So on that count, I think Hann’s first point stands – and that journalism educators and universities should make this fact as plain as possible to student applicants. After all, no torture is equal to that of encouragement of hope.

I still think, though, that the good grads (have a look at Lara O’Reilly if you want an example of one) will still do well and find their way. They’re already better prepared than a load of us lot were back in the summer of 2004 and what the best ones need now more than anything is a little luck.

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Paul Bradshaw has recently begun a series on successful journalism students who have gone on to great jobs in the media. To see all nine of those profiled so far, have a look at the New Online Journalists.

My Firefox Add Ons

This is a list for myself as much as anything. So, Peter. The next time that your computer breaks and is wiped clean by IT – then these are the main things that you need.

Delicious Bookmarks – Access your bookmarks wherever you go and keep them organised

Firebug – Web development tool

Fire FTP – An FTP client for Firefox – and a pretty good one at that

Fireshot – For screenshots of entire screens which can be edited and saved as JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP

Google Toolbar for Firefox – A bunch of Google Tools and the (in)famous green page rank bar

LinkDiagnosis – For examining link competition

NoDoFollow – Highlight links in a document and splits them between follow/do follow

SearchStatus – Displays the Google, Alexa, Compete and Linkscape rankings of a website

YSlow – measuring loading speeds – more important with the advent of Google Caffeine. It also contains Smush.it – a good free tool from Yahoo for optimising web images

And a couple of software packages

Jing – for screenshots

Traffic Travis – for keyword reporting and backlinks

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Image credit: Olaya B

Nineteenth century newspapers

I spent Saturday searching through newspapers at the British Library branch up in Colindale. It’s an odd enough place with pale blue walls, stiff wooden doors and an atmosphere that is best described as a mix between a 1960’s comprehensive and an old village hall. It’s not too difficult to detect that the old building will be closed in 2012 and that – in the meantime – it is more lingering on than existing outright.

Still, the newspapers are what make the place and there are some fabulous collections stored there. I’ve always enjoyed reading 19^th century newspapers. They’ve a knack for savage clarity and pithy expression. Of course, they might be inaccurate, prim, judgemental and filled to the rafters with quack medical adverts, but nowadays, while browsing through them, these are things to enjoy rather than endure.

Best of all, of course, are the news snippets. Something like NIBS, I suppose, published weekly in a section usually titled ‘Home News.’ Here’s an imagined version of how they might have reported the Raoul Moat case. It’s a bit of a tonic from all today’s over-reporting.

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Manhunt

Saturday evening last. In a most calamitous incident Raoul Moat, of Newcastle Upon Tyne, did shoot dead with a shotgun one Chris Brown of the same neighbourhood. Moat, aged 37, a known villain, did, by the same weapon, moments after, shoot a subsequent victim, Samantha Stobbart, through a window, causing near fatal bleeding. A terrific chase was made after Moat by the town magistrates until the wretched criminal was discovered some days afterwards near a river in the village of Rothbury, close to this city. Moat, who exhibited many signs of rough living, held a shotgun to his temple in the most violent and effecting manner for a period upwards of six hours, raging wildly at the magistrates and agents of the law who had beset him on all sides. At a little after one o’clock in the morning, the lamentable man, who demonstrated very many signs of the hardest sorrows and most deranged ravings of the mind, did launch himself forever into eternity with the aid of his gun. An inquest was held on the body the following day by Ms Sue Sim, JP, Coroner. Verdict – lunacy.

Image credit:Effervescing Elephant

As the South African World Cup draws towards its end, I thought that it would be useful to have a look at what Google Trends has made of the competition.

The Players

It’s a simple process. I’ve just pulled out the names of five players – Robert Green, David Villa, Lionel Messi, Arjen Robben and Diego Forlan – who I feel have had (for one reason or another)  notable tournaments. And this is what Google Trends comes out with:

(Click image above to enlarge)

It all started off with a big spike for Robert Green after the USA game – testimony to the awfulness of his error and, quite probably, the fact that people knew little about him. They had to type his name into Google to find out more.

The most hyped player, Lionel Messi, has had consistent attention all the way until Argentina’s exit the other day. David Villa’s popularity has rocketed up in the past week with his cluster of goals, as has the Uruguayan, Diego Forlan’s. Villa’s spike after his goal against Paraguay just about beat Robert Green’s earlier on in total number of global searches.

It’s interesting to note that, in comparison, barely anyone has been interested in Arjen Robben, the best Dutch player – despite the fact that he has scored two goals in four games and been an important part of a team that might win the whole competition.

The Coaches

(Click image above to enlarge)

Here’s the same exercise performed for a handful of manager/coaches: Vicente del Bosque, Diego Maradona, Fabio Capello, Raymond Domenech and Bert Van Marwijk.

It’s plain to see that Maradona is the most high profile coach on this list – followed by Fabio Capello, who has about two thirds of the global interest. Raymond Domenech, who presided over the French shambles, briefly rivalled the two of them in interest but has now slipped off into obscurity while – interestingly enough – no one seems to be too interested in searching for information about the coaches of either of the finalists – Vicente del Bosque of Spain and Bert Van Marwijk of Holland.

So. If we consider Google Trends to be reflective of general interest in a topic, then, these graphs suggest that it is far better to let the players and coaches get on with it – with less of the microscopic scrutiny – rather than whipping ourselves up in the usual frenzy.

As if.

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Here are the Google Trends results for players and the Google Trends results for coaches – in case you’d like to try some different ones.

Image credit: Shine 2010 on Flickr