Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The perils of (allegedly) being mean to advertisers
- OJR.org: Google’s punishment and the perils of blackhat SEO
- At The Miami Herald, maybe newsroom place still matters
| The perils of (allegedly) being mean to advertisers Posted: 26 Nov 2013 11:49 AM PST With America’s favorite shopping holiday just a few days away, two tales from journalists who claim to have failed in their enterprises because of their refusal to play nice with advertisers. One comes from Mark Duffy, also known as the Copyranter, who left a copywriter job to join BuzzFeed, only to be fired from the media startup last month. Yesterday, he published one last rant, via Gawker, titled “TOP 10 BEST EVER WTF OMG REASONS BUZZFEED FIRED ME, LOL!”
In a level headed response, Ben Smith says he has “never based a decision about reporting on an advertiser’s needs” and illustrates some of the editorial conflicts he and Duffy had. Then, today, we had Mathew Ingram’s account of what happened to NSFW Corp., as told through the eyes of Paul Carr.
Enjoy your holiday! |
| OJR.org: Google’s punishment and the perils of blackhat SEO Posted: 26 Nov 2013 08:09 AM PST
After my first story, Oneflare did its best to take down the legally actionable parts of its scheme — removing the logos, deleting the archives — but still carried on as the “Online Journal Review,” featuring links back to the main Oneflare website. This is a common if scuzzy search engine optimization strategy: Use sites with high PageRank sites (those Google considers highly legit) to generate links to your company’s website, passing some of the Google juice earned over 15 years of publishing to the new venture. After my second story, Oneflare removed all the content from OJR.org; it’s currently a blank site. Thanks to a little birdie, we know now that there have been consequences for Oneflare’s actions. This thread in Google’s Webmaster Central forums tells the tale of someone named “hubfub” who has recently felt the wrath of Google’s punishment for SEO bad behavior. His post from Sunday (U.S. time, Monday in Australia):
A Google “manual action” means that the search giant detected sketchy SEO behavior and decided to dock the site:
So who is the “hubfub” facing this punishment? Well, @hubfub on Twitter is Adam Dong, the CTO of Oneflare. And later on in that thread, Mister Hubfub notes that Oneflare.com.au is the website he’s worried about protecting. Dong also tweeted a plea for help at two of Google’s chief SEO staffers Sunday, too: (Full disclosure: After I saw that Oneflare’s spammed-up OJR post were still showing up as legitimate news articles in Google News, I contacted someone I know at Google to make sure they knew about it — so it’s entirely possible I triggered the manual review.) Dong said in that thread that this is the message he got from Google:
In other words: Google saw what they were doing with OJR, caught them, and punished them by demoting them in search results. (One way to see this: search for one flare with a space. At this writing, nine of the top 10 sites in the results are about Oneflare. But none of them are the Oneflare site itself. In fact, the Nieman Lab tag page for Oneflare ranked higher than Oneflare itself. The Oneflare homepage hasn’t been removed entirely from search, though; it’s still the top result for a search on “oneflare” itself.) Dong’s fellow webmasters, posting in that Google discussion thread, didn’t seem to have much sympathy for his plight. Here’s a sampling:
The Warrior Forum referenced is this site, which serves as a sort of back-alley hangout for blackhat SEO types. User hubfub has posted there 29 times (sample: “Hi there, I recently purchased a bunch of expired domains and set up new blogs on them”). And on a number of occasions, he appears to have bought backlinks from higher-value websites to send more juice Oneflare’s way. (Click to enlarge.)
In other words, it’s hard for Oneflare to play the innocent here. Its CTO was already busy buying up fake links in the dark corners of the web more than a year ago. It’s apparently been caught by Google this year for bad dealings and punished — only to get back at it again. They had this coming. (The only area where Oneflare really was unlucky was in picking a website that I happened to care about.) The SEO damage may be bad enough that Oneflare could be looking to change domains entirely. A few hours ago, user hubfub posted again:
No idea if this is the plan, but Dong also owns oneflare.net. If you enjoy irony, you’ll appreciate that Dong wrote a piece last month for the Sydney Morning Herald. The headline? “Five simple tips for a good SEO strategy: What’s the best way to get your web site to the top of internet search lists?” One of his pieces of wisdom: “External links are important for SEO because as far as a search engine is concerned, these are considered an endorsement of your site, increasing your ranking power and making your site more visible.” I imagine Tip #6 wasn’t “Do enough bad stuff for Google to drop the hammer on you.” One of my favorite stories from the earlier days of the web is the tale of nigritude ultramarine. Every so often, SEO types hold a contest to see who can build up the most SEO juice around a particular phrase in a given period of time — to see who can earn the top search result when someone looks up those words. It’s best if that phrase doesn’t already exist anywhere on the web, so a nonsense phrase like nigritude ultramarine works well. In 2004, that magic phrase was announced, and everyone had a couple of months to start gaming search engines. Lots of competitors tried lots of tricks. A search for “nigritude ultramarine” returned zero results before the contest; it returned more than 200,000 afterward. But, in the end, the winner wasn’t an SEO consultant; it was Anil Dash, the popular blogger, who wrote a single post with that phrase as its title and simply asked his fans to link to it. “I’d rather see a real blog win than any of the fake sites that show up on that search result right now,” he wrote. While SEO types were polluting the web with links, Dash took the prize with a single post — because he’d built up credibility through writing good content for years, and because he had actual human readers who were willing to support his efforts. I always thought of that win as a triumph for real humanity on the web. What’s the best way to get ranked high in Google? Write good content. Be good enough that real humans like you. As Dash told Wired back in 2004 after his victory:
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| At The Miami Herald, maybe newsroom place still matters Posted: 26 Nov 2013 07:00 AM PST When The Miami Herald left its home on Biscayne Bay, many in the newsroom were wistful. The newsroom had been right in the heart of downtown and home to memories and legends. Two movies had been shot in the building: Absence of Malice, with a young Sally Field and a hunky Paul Newman, featuring real scenes of the newsroom, and The Mean Season, with Kurt Russell and the tale of a reporter who became the story while covering a serial killer. And in an odd but appropriate juxtaposition to these bustling portraits of the busy newsroom, a recent episode of Burn Notice featured the old building burning down. Downtown, sometimes the news even came to the Herald building. In 2005, Miami-Dade County Commissioner Arthur Teele, shot himself in the Herald lobby. And perhaps you'll remember the face-eating zombie case last year, captured on video by the Herald's own surveillance cameras. But today, the newsroom sits all the way out in Doral, a city 12 miles from downtown Miami — about an hour away in traffic. That distance has led some to wonder how much, beyond nostalgia, if the newspaper was missing out on the advantages of being at the center of news. The jury is out. But my conversations about the new workflows there have belied easy assumptions about the presumed mobility of digital journalists on the go enabled with new technology. I visited the newsroom two weeks ago and talked about these issues with journalists for my research as a Tow Fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. On one hand, head photo editor Roman Lyskowski says the move "does not affect what I do or what other journalists do." But other reporters noted a distinct difference on their daily workflow. Being out in the burbs makes them feel far away from where the news is happening. One metro reporter told me: "Going anywhere during the day is completely out of the way — it will take hours to go to a meeting, and you can't just drop in on a meeting." He continued: "You are just stuck downtown and you can't come back if you want to. You can't get that more casual interaction or run in to someone or have coffee." Several county government offices are in Doral, including the county police and election board. But as another metro reporter complained, "There's nothing that I cover that's out here. I cover the city of Miami." One reporter who was covering an election recount noted that she couldn't get from the recount to a press conference with one of the candidates because it was simply too far, and that she had to be prepared to have someone else on standby should anything happen — a difficulty when resources are slim. Journalists consistently told me that they didn't particularly love the idea of being mobile. Writing in a Starbucks day after day wasn't fun, and writing from home meant missing out on casual interaction with sources and fellow journalists. For all we’ve heard about the promise of mobile journalism, it hasn’t proved as freeing as one might think, at least not at The Miami Herald. Journalists really like being in a newsroom — and that’s a problem when your location is physically distant from most from the places you might be reporting from. Courts reporter Jay Weaver acknowledged that in a digital world, buildings didn't mean much from a technical standpoint. “In this day and age, though, it is all digitally-driven. You don't need a building…The newsroom can be anywhere.” At the same time, he placed a significant importance on being in the newsroom:
A fair number of reporters I spoke with shared his view. Other journalists talked about the difficulty of being on the road. Reporter Chuck Rabin said "I could be mobile…It sounds easy: You can just jump in your car and file from the front seat. But it’s not as easy as you think. I can file from my phone, but it's just not as convenient as actually being in the newsroom." And neighbors reporter Cristina Veiga, who has always filed her work as a mobile journalist, says it’s still “a pain working out of a coffee shop. You can do a lot working from the office…and downtown, you could just run to stuff." Why does this matter? In the age when technology has supposedly reduced the importance of place and where reporters can be working anywhere at any time, reporters at The Miami Herald argue that the location of the newsroom still matters. Geographical proximity to what they cover matters. And this is because they actually use the newsroom — it’s not just some building now rendered unimportant by the rise of mobile devices. Rather, the ease of production for journalists may still be improved by having a set place to work. There is some intangible quality about being able to talk to the person across your cube or nag your editor or ask a colleague a question by the coffee pot. Working from your phone may facilitate live reporting of breaking news, but one wonders whether that outweighs the drawbacks of a decentralized newsroom. In some of the newsrooms I have visited, like the Star-Telegram in Fort Worth, mobile reporting was more developed. Reporters liked it — the transportation reporter defined his identity as a backpack journalist. Yet in Miami, the physical dislocation of space from the center of the city has meant a rethinking of what it means to be inside a newsroom. And as newsrooms think about relocation and digital-first initiatives, it's worth considering whether mobile is for everyone and what gets lost in the digital diaspora of the journalist away from the newsroom. Photo of the former Miami Herald building by Phillip Pessar used under a Creative Commons license. |
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