SEO is based on what people are typing into search engines. It’s relatively black and white, people are looking for something or they are not. So what happens when people’s searches are based on entirely a misperception? A recent incident surrounding the construction of an Islamic Community Center (two blocks from) the World Trade Center site, has led news organizations to look more carefully at the issues that arise when SEO and journalistic accuracy don't mix.
In a Google Images search for Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalism we were surprised to see the first result: "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
Not that Tobe Hooper's 1974 indie horror film isn't worthy of some kind of award for dramatic photography. (Only an unflinching cameraman is brave enough stand down a chainsaw wielding Leatherface.)
But how did a harbinger to the slasher film genre get mixed in with lionized hard-news war photography like "Napalm Girl" and "Saigon Execution?"
Blame the Google Images algorithm for being unable to discern fact from fiction.
There is no denying Huffington Post's substantial growth over the past few years.
Where once they were deemed a political blog, today they strive to be "America's Internet Newspaper." The site is well on its way with 22 verticals and a readership and revenue which some have projected to eclipse the New York Times by 2014.
They've got to be doing something right.
Newspapers are worried.
And yet, they have some of the most enviable resources in the online space: professional journalists and opinion leaders with fact-checking chops capable of producing nuanced, in-depth and often tide-turning prose.
Yahoo, AOL and DemandMedia could be seen as potential competitors, but only if newspapers chose to relax their standards of journalistic excellence.
In our post on the Top 10 Works of Journalism of the decade, we posited that it was not a matter of if but when a non-traditional journalist took home a Pulitzer Prize.
This week Pro Publica, a non-profit newsroom, was honored for “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” its excellent investigative coverage of the struggles and heroism of a New Orleans’ hospital during Hurricane Katrina.
Everyday someone in the online media world is weighing in on the “future of publishing.” My Google Alert updates can testify to it. Sometimes it’s even one of the team members here at Perfect Market.
This post is the first of what will be a weekly feature on the Perfect Market blog entitled “The Pulse of Publishing.” The idea is to take in all the buzz related to the newest developments in the media sphere, distill it, connect some dots and draw some conclusions.
It’s easy to get hung up on the ‘death of publishing’ and to focus on what’s not happening or what could be done to ’save’ the industry.
A powerful reminder that the lifeblood of the news industry remains ground-breaking original reporting began coursing across the web yesterday when NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute released its “Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade, 2000-2009.”
The ten works (five newspaper series, four books, and a radio program) chosen by NYU from a group of 80 nominees represent ‘journalism that brilliantly met the challenges of the last decade.’ Quite a decade it was with reports on 9/11, the economic crisis, the Iraq war, Katrina and the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ rounding out the list.
We started our day here at SXSW attending a panel in support of our colleague Tim Ruder, entitled “Imagineering the Fully Digitized and Connected Future.”
Organizer Dan Willis had presenters each take two hours of a single day in 2015. Speakers then described their future vision in narrative form with supporting pictures. The presenters had no idea what anyone was going to say in advance, and neither did we. The result was a surprisingly cohesive view of the future, with each presenter offering their own cluster of provocative ideas about how the future would play out. A video and deck will be available and once it is we’ll update this post to include it.
31 August 2010 By Perfect Market
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