I don’t give a **** about Google!

Had an interesting debate about the internet with a good mate of mine in the pub last Thursday.

Apparently he’d uploaded a story onto his paper’s website, done the headline only for the web editor to alter his headline in an effort to get the name of the paper’s city in it.

“It’s fer Google, mate,” said the indignant web editor. “Search Engine Optimisation.”

“But I don’t give a **** about Google,” my friend replied. “The internet doesn’t make any money for this company.”

He went on about how the art of headline writing had been destroyed by the internet.

And he went on to argue that uploading all the paper’s stories in full before the paper hit the streets was just barmy and was costing the paper thousands of sales.

At first I thought the whole argument was one typical of many regional press journalists – the King Canute ‘I won’t have owt to do with t’internet, it’s killing papers’ malarky.

And the argument about not doing a headline properly for the appropriate medium (ie web is different to print because people read differently online) is just plain daft to me.

Television doesn’t work on radio and radio usually doesn’t work on TV. Different platform, different rules, I’m afraid mate.

But the more I thought about his final point, about uploading the whole paper’s stories word for word before the print version hit the street, the more I realised he was actually right.

Regional press companies really ought to be using the internet in a complementary way, rather than conflicting with an existing product.

They should be looking to tease what’s in the paper, or give a cut-down version of it (after all, you’re always told on training courses ‘don’t make the reader scroll and don’t give lots of text’.)

Hell, you could even rewrite the story to encourage some comments before it goes to print and then actually use some of the comments in print.

But it is business suicide to just give away your story in full, word for word, in a media which at present earns your company a fifth of what its core (print) business earns.

It just makes no sense. I’m all for developing the internet (and I know newspaper sales were declining long before the web became an extension of what a journalist does), but all this exercise does is undermine the foundations of the business.

And it shouldn’t be that way.

I’ve never been one to say that web will replace print – perhaps it will on some dailies and nationals, but I think there’ll always be a need and demand for printed products in some shape or form.

My mate’s dead right. A more sensible, intelligent and complimentary way of working needs to be found, particularly in this current climate.

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