While SEO won’t cause readers to flock to stories about urban poverty or the Euro, people who care about those subjects are crucial to us, and—to be blunt—to a certain type of advertiser. They are the influencers, the tipping-point people. Influencers live in narrow channels and respond to articles that make it clear why things matter and how problems are being solved.
Editor John Yemma of The Christian Science Monitor gives an interesting perspective in this article about how and why his publication does what it does in trading a daily newspaper for a weekly magazine and becoming a web-first newsroom with heavy emphasis on things such as search engine optimization in headlines.
At first blush, one could assume the motivations are typical of other publishers – to cut costs and maximize audience for the sake of advertising.
But while Yemma does acknowledge an advertising motivation at least in part, he rather pointedly rejects the conventional wisdom of building as big an audience as you can from wherever you can find it. He even notes as a mistake one instance in which the Monitor posted an article about Sandra Bullock’s marital problems even though that article skyrocketed to the top of the most-viewed list. Why? Because people interested in that kind of story are not the kind of people the Monitor is trying to collect and serve. He similarly notes that including coverage of Europe in and on the Monitor’s pages, while unfortunately not a huge draw for most American readers, draws exactly the kind of readers his publication wants.
Some might call it being elitist. Yemma calls it being target and knowing your audience – which he rightly describes as Job One for today’s news media, digital or whatever. It’s about picking your audience rather than just taking whatever you get. It’s about the essential change in the definition of “mass media” today, where “mass” still means large but not bulk.