How Bing and Twitter Can Save Journalism

This commentary was originally posted at CauseCast.org.

If you Google the "demise of journalism," some 718,000 results will appear detailing the transition of consumers to the Internet, the decline of advertising revenue, the hacking of newsroom editorial staffs, the artificial knowledge of crowd-sourced information, and the collective threat to intellectualism and civic responsibility. Usually fingers are pointed at culprits from spineless newspaper publishers to free community classifieds on Craigslist to aggregator sites like The Drudge Report and The Huffington Post. What doesn't get enough attention in these conversations, however, is the component that will have the greatest impact on whether the imperative concept of "news judgment" survives the New Media Revolution: search engine optimization.

Last Wednesday marked a major milestone in the future of journalism when two critical events shook up the status quo in the world of search. First, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a partnership deal that will make the former's new search engine, Bing, the official search function for all Yahoo! sites. Second, and more subtly, Twitter launched a redesign of its home page (be logged out to view) that prominently features search functionality, encouraging users to "share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world" in its new tag line. The emergence of Bing and Twitter mark the first formidable competitors to Google, which until now has monopolized the market on search, and thus the diversity of thought in journalism's Internet era.

If thoughtful citizens used to seek out essential news prioritized for them by experienced editors on the front page of a paper or the home page of a web site or the lead segment of a broadcast, that process has now become more haphazard. The Internet's artificial intelligence does that for us, with and without our input. As personally-compiled RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, selective link surfing and search queries have replaced the traditional entry points to consuming news, the onus of deciding what's important now falls on the individual himself, or in many cases is thrown to the wisdom of the crowd on Digg and Google trends. This means we've all become reliant on Google's algorithm that pulls up search results and determines a story's popularity, and if our favorite, most reliable news outlets aren't up to snuff on 2009's hottest SEO tactics we're likely not going to encounter their important work. It will be lost, buried on the 50th page of search results behind whatever messages an expert in metadata (the keyword language the algorithm speaks) has designed for us.

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Comments

[Opti]

Right, Bing is going to save journalism by hijacking users? And Twitter? "share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world"? To my neighbor's cat? Journalism is in crisis because companies won't pay for investigative reports anymore. They make more money on commentary and passing on press releases. Talking heads and opinion. Who needs fact-checking or vetting?

"Google, which until now has monopolized the market on search, and thus the diversity of thought in journalism's Internet era." Google killed the diversity of thought? I thought it brought traffic to HuffPO, Firedoglake, and other resources for information.

[mediamarv]

My thoughts exactly; thanks for removing the need for me to type.

There has never been such an abundance of diversity of thought ... or even thoughtlessness. Over two hundred thousand hits on a Google search result? That's diversity for you.

[Grazor]

There isn't any difference between optimizing for bikini pictures or a war story. SEO is simply a combination of keywords and backlinks. Google isn't going to give you bikini pictures if you don't search for it. It isn't google's responsibility to "vet" news stories, it simply return's the most relevant page it can find based on the query. Tabloid reporting is more popular because there is more demand for it, not because they are better optimized. Bing isn't any worse or better, it works exactly the same way, just different advertisers and the algorithm is a little different. No search engine can tell the responsibility of reporting, that is determined by the writers reputation.

[dannylovesdogs]

You can already get Bing & Yahoo results on www.infospace.com. You get Google, Ask and Twittter results too.

[JimBozo]

Yahoo was the top search engine until Google emerged. Yahoo had many other competitors until that point. None of them were particularly good, as they all depended upon a very crude algorithm based upon keywords embedded in a site's index page by its designer. Until Google, search engines were so crude that there was one compilation search site called Dogpile, which ran the search through all existing search engines.

Google instantly blew them all away, with its vastly superior search algorithm. Microsoft's Bing may have some advantages, but typical of MS ware, it's way too infested with bells and whistles for my taste. I like a nice clean search engine interface that just does the basic job.