Posted on Feb 24, 2012 in Future of News, More Visitors: SEO & SEM | 0 comments

As newspapers make the transition from print to online, they need to understand the importance of adjusting their editorial style to fit the new medium. I should quote Marshall McLuhan, but years ago I worked with tech writer and information architect Freda Salatino, who used to say (in her Long Island accent), “When you create an online help system from a user guide, don’t just schlep the book online.” Like McLuhan, her point was that online is used differently from print, and that certainly holds true for news as well. The easiest  and most important lesson is in how you use images. Print papers don’t put a photo with ever story. With online stories, photos should be the rule, not the exception. Online is now a multimedia experience. This  is in part why forward-thinking news executives like John Paton issued Flip video cameras to all his journalists, and why every reporter in the DNAinfo newsroom carries a camera. With smartphones now boasting high-resolution cameras and high-def video, there is no longer an excuse for a journalist not carrying a camera in his or her pocket. Why can’t you ignore putting photos on the bulk of your stories? Here are a few good reasons: Every story is your home page—your front page. Unless you are a hugely trusted brand, up to 90% of your online traffic is coming from search engines. (Don’t believe it? See my previous post about what you can learn from site analytics and go check for yourself.) Even if you are a trusted brand, meaning that you have a huge number of repeat visitors to your home page, it still means that perhaps 50% of your traffic is coming from a search engine. This means that your readers are first seeing your site from the perspective of a story page. Would you ever have a front page with no photos? I don’t think so. There are also significant search engine optimization (SEO) benefits in putting images on every story. Search engines like Google give higher ranking to web pages with photos, as long as the photos are properly tagged with metadata (the title and alt tags...

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