Exclusive: Corey Delaney Gate Crashes News’ Party

Wanted: someone to market dross using the latest online techniques. Should not be squeamish about compromising news standards to fatten the advertising margins. Experience in using editorial resources to pitch for advertising accounts an advantage.

This media dystopia is breathtakingly realised by David Higgins in an excellent contribution to the debate about the future of news gathering and reporting in a digitally fixated world. The article, ‘Scooped by the net’ is published in the February/March 2008 edition of The Walkley Magazine.

The article is one of the most unapologetic of its type, arguing in a very clinical manner, that online news services, and specifically journalists, need to get smarter about the ‘design’ and marketing of copy. Higgins’ premise is that the fragmentation of news services, with blogs and the like, as well as resurgent services like BigPond, are stripping audiences from incumbents like News and Fairfax.

The corrollary of this summation is that the news agenda is increasingly set by search specialists like Google (and its AdSense platform), even when the author freely admits that the incumbents are still the beneficiaries of “great journalism”. However, it seems great journalism is not enough to to keep the incumbents afloat over the longer term. Instead, a dose of sales and search savvy (SSS) is required to ensure a competitive advantage.

Reading the article twice to be absolutely sure of what was actually being advocated, the proposed solution includes proliferating the use of search engine optimisation (SEO), contextual ads and turbo-boosting the relevancy of general online advertising through behavioural targeting analytics. The latter requiring more of an emphasis on reader registration to ensure validated personal details become the primary queues for targeted advertising.

The revolution doesn’t end there. Online news services must develop “new sections…to accommodate advertisers”, while eyeball minutes - that often misinterpreted audience metric - must be inflated using a maze of widgets, trinkets and a host of sensory paraphernalia.

Yes, this all requires news gatherers to be multi-skilled, as well as gain an appetite for stress spread across a 12-hour day, but hey, if you can’t stand the heat, “get a new career.”

The argument for smarter marketing techniques shouldn’t be an argument. It should be a given. SEO is now a hygiene factor for best-practice content production, while the value behavioural targeting (BT) is able to unleash in an advertising context, will, at a minimum, triple the return on its investment. These developments are extraordinarily important in a modern news gathering operation, and their advocation by someone from the editorial side of the ledger is inspiring.

Yet an argument which assumes the cup runeth over with “great journalism” and lays the blame on inadequate marketing techniques for failing to reach the Corey Delaney’s of this world, and the subsequent fragmentation of online news audiences, is a fairly self-serving and falls well short of the mark in terms of explaining current inadequacies.

For example, Margaret Simons in her recent book, The Content Makers, makes the charge that Australia is stunningly underreported for a $1.1 trillion dollar ‘business’ and community. In this context, is it more plausible to assume that the fragmentation of the online news market isn’t necessarily the result of a poor listing on a Google results page but because the product itself is becoming increasingly inadequate in terms of orginality, scope of coverage and insight?

In short, it isn’t Corey who is abandoning, suppplementing or shortening their association with the incumbents, but professionals, technocrats and other IP-rich personnel who are simply dissatisfied with the sameness of news lists, and how competing mastheads run similar editorial lines to optimise their Google commissions.

Consider the following concept which illustrates the increasing gap between the direction and resources of existing news gathering. The two terms used here are the Journalism Info/Utility Index (JII) and the Available Data Index (ADI). In short, with the measurement, collection and digitisation of information growing in lock-step with computing power and device innovation, are the capabilities and skills of our news gathering ‘facilities’ keeping pace?

Even accepting that this hypothesis is only half true, there is still some semblance of a disconnect between what is being delivered in a news sense and the volume of data being produced on a daily basis. Ergo, in steps the specialists, the analysts and citizen journalists to fill the gap.

Online publishers of all persuasions need to understand that the returns from their online marketing (ROMI), no matter how sophisticated in scope (e.g. SEM), will continue to decline so long as:

a) all publishers play the Google game and base their editorial policy on the same search data;

b) become too aggressive/manic in replicating Facebook’s widget and API potpourri in the vein hope of propping up session times;

c) compromise editorial quality (including journalistic codes) for the sake of optimising advertising revenues through paid links and advertorials.

On the last point, the danger of short-term gain at the expense of brand integrity over the longer term are obvious. Hence, the suspicion that comments such as these are calculated on the basis that all publishers will adhere to similar practices, leaving no-one at a competitive disadvantage. A key question here is how do the offline mastheads view this type of risk taking?

A concrete consequence? Consider the upcoming pitch for Emirates’ $150m media account. Why wouldn’t a publisher tag -team with a short-listed agency to strengthen the bid by offering online editorial resources to improve the media strategy’s cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) results?

Realistically, the ADI-JII gap will never close, ensuring the ongoing proliferation of online news sources, which over time will only build up their own credibility and editorial quality to the benefit of their own Google rank.

The slippery slope for incumbent news groups is to compromise on editorial quality and play by similar marketing rules by hedging the low-to-medium growth in general online advertising with a paramount search (AdSense) advertising strategy. This road inevitably leads to the commoditisation of news where the returns are negliable compared to value associated with a strategy that perceptively minimises the ADI-JII gap. If that means growing at a lower rate than the market then so-be-it.