Thursday, October 15, 2009 5:54 PM
The story behind a deleted post
Mathew Ingram
In a post written earlier today on our books blog, In Other Words, online books editor Peter Scowen expressed some strong opinions about an internal Globe and Mail workshop we held a few days ago that looked at the issue of "search engine optimization" or SEO. We removed Peter's post, but I want to be clear about why we did that, in part to address some comments that have been made about its disappearance.
There's no question that the impact of search-engine optimization on journalism and media in general is the subject of heated debate -- and even outside the media sphere there is plenty of debate about the topic, as anyone who has read the recent blog posts on it by Danny Sullivan and Derek Powazek can attest. There are no doubt plenty of people both inside and outside the Globe who agree with much of what Peter said in his post.
So why did we remove it? The simple answer is that the Books blog isn't really the place for a debate on the merits of SEO and how it affects the job of Globe editors and headline writers, as Peter himself has acknowledged. We encourage debate about those issues, and SEO is a subject we are all trying to come to grips with, as every other online media entity no doubt is (or should be). But the Books blog wasn't the right forum for that conversation.
I asked Kenny Yum, editor of globeandmail.com, for his thoughts about what happened, and he agreed with what I've described above. He also added this comment:
”It’s important for us to be transparent to you, our readers -- it’s what makes this medium so engaging and new for us. And as newsrooms adapt in an era when we're talking about search engine optimization and other best practices that help us better serve you, we expect and encourage debate about what this means for our craft. The Globe in that way is no different than other newspapers and media outlets. We are striving to be better even if that means that we understand the modern means of distribution and the way readers interact with us. We also invite debate to happen inside and outside the newsroom."
