Tam Harbert

If you’re a freelancer and you’re not familiar with Demand Media, then you haven’t checked the listings on JournalismJobs.com and MediaBistro for years. If you’re not a freelancer, you’ve seen lots of Demand Media’s products, although you probably haven’t realized it. Do a Google search on just about anything, and you’ll find them. Go ahead and search on “best way to wash a dog,” right now. See the results that come up from eHow.com (two of the first four listings)? That’s just one of the sites owned by Demand Media.

Demand Media, along with other companies like Suite 101, Associated Content and About.com, is a content farm, a new type of media company that bases its business model on search engine optimization (SEO). Most freelancers don’t like these companies and their business models. First of all, they pay a pittance, usually $15 to $20 per article. Many of the people who write for these sites are novice writers, not journalists, willing to take such low wages just to get published. Second, these companies don’t value good writing nor do they offer good service to the reader. The content farm’s chief aim is to mass-produce chunks of text designed to rank highly on Google. The higher an article ranks on Google, the more readers it drives to Demand Media sites, thus generating large numbers of page views, which means more advertising dollars. It doesn’t matter whether the information is accurate or useful, whether the article is written well, or even if it makes any sense whatsoever. What matters is that the article is stuffed with key words and that the writer uses other tricks that will get the article ranked highly in Google search results.

This is known as search engine optimization (SEO). It’s a trend that prickles the skin of good journalists everywhere who are under pressure from the bean counters to “optimize” their articles. “Building Web traffic through ‘search engine optimization’ has become a major part of a journalist’s job,” writes The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro in a recent column. It’s a symptom of the fact that most publications haven’t yet figured out how to make money by publishing quality editorial on the Web. It’s a desperate attempt to prop up their advertising revenues.

Many of my colleagues – both staff and freelance – are experiencing this to some degree. The good news, however, is that older, established publications – ones that existed before the Internet – are more discerning about it. They want high-quality editorial first, then they tweak it with SEO.

“My editors are very sensitive to anything that looks or feels like whoring out a story,” says one client. “Yet at the same time you want your work to be seen, so it’s yet another one of those fine lines. We aren’t putting EgyptKatyPerrySarahPalinViagra in the first line of every story (or in the keywords, which some even respectable publications do) but we did have a two-hour edit seminar from an outside firm on SEO tactics.”

On the other hand, a freelance colleague who experimented with Demand Media gave up after she tried to both write a good story AND adhere to the company’s editorial guidelines. “You’ve only got, like, 250 words, and here they are telling you what words to use,” and where, she says.

Demand Media’s recent initial public offering seemed to be a vote of confidence in the SEO-based business model. As of Feb. 7, the share price was $19, giving the company a market capitalization of around $1.6 billion. However, Demand Media has yet to turn a profit. For the first nine months of 2010, it lost $6.3 million, according to Folio.

Meanwhile, Google is taking aim at these companies. As content farms have emerged, they’ve flooded the Internet with crappy articles, which makes Google’s search service less useful. Consumers are not finding the information they want and need, and they are complaining. “We hear the feedback from the Web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content,” blogged Matt Cutts, Google search engineer, in January. The company plans to adjust its algorithm to try to strip out some of this drivel.

Think about this for a minute. The content farms use a business model that generates articles that people don’t like, even though these companies are targeting topics that people are interested in. It’s an SEO shell game of keywords that leaves readers dissatisfied and frustrated. It’s not making money. And it’s in Google’s crosshairs. Does this sound like a recipe for success?

I hope the next couple of years brings the failure of these farms and proves that to grow good content, you need to start with good ingredients.

My freelance writing usually falls into one of two categories: straight journalism and custom publishing. Over the last year, as journalism and independent publishing suffers the extinction of the dead-tree business model and desperately searches for digital models that can replace it, custom publishing has become a much larger part of my business.

Custom publishing – producing articles, newsletters and magazines for a corporation or organization – is a form of marketing. As such, the goal of the writing is usually to get someone to buy something. Even the high-brow, glossy custom magazines that publish in-depth articles aimed at top-level executives are selling something. The goal of these magazines is often “thought leadership,” a vague marketing term that means the company is promoting how smart it is. They are trying to get the reader to buy into the image of the leaders of this corporation as particularly intelligent, insightful and strategic thinkers.

Such phrases have started creeping into my vocabulary as I do more custom work. I’ve always been a stickler with myself, and with others whom I edit, about keeping language simple, clear and concise. While many marketers value good writing, some do not. They – and the executives above them – apparently think imprecise, vague language effectively promotes their product or advances their agenda. Granted, the goal is to sell something, to in some way influence the reader’s behavior, but to do that you need to hook readers – by entertaining them, piquing their curiosity or delivering valuable information. Marketing people often think in terms of what they, and their company, want to say, rather than what the reader – their customer – needs. I try to point out to them that few people will actually read their custom magazine or corporate white paper unless it’s interesting, well-written or useful – and preferably all three. And those that do read it aren’t likely to take action if they get the sense that the article is just promoting the company.

But the marketing folks sign the checks. My job is to write what they want in the way they want it. So I cringe, subvert my hard-earned skills and write how I’m told. I write about challenges, rather than problems. There are no products or services – they are all solutions. Some are even, God forbid, unique solutions. And these solutions are often optimized, a word that runs all too rampant in marketing copy. (To optimize is to “make as effective, perfect or useful as possible.” If you have to optimize a product, that implies it wasn’t very effective or useful to start with.) All the while I imagine my notoriously loud and dictatorial journalism professor, John Bremner, rolling over in his grave and screaming “barbarisms!” (Yes, that word applies to writing. According to Dictionary.com, definition #3: “the use in a language of forms or constructions felt by some to be undesirably alien to the established standards of the language.”)

I know I shouldn’t complain. After all, in a strict business sense, my goal is to please my customer. Still, it gives me a stomach ache to write this way. And that’s not all. Like a fungus in a dark room, these marketing phrases and meaningless executive pronouncements proliferate and sneak into my journalism. It doesn’t help that I often interview marketing people, as well as executives, for my stories, and thus am exposed to these phrases on several fronts.

How to combat this? One of the best antidotes I’ve found is editing work. In college, Bremner seared so many editing commandments into my brain that I somehow channel him when I edit other’s work. My ability to sniff out the inexact phrase or dangling participle becomes keener when I read someone else’s copy. When I don’t have others to edit, I try to bifurcate my personality. I’ll write a draft of something, let it sit for a day, and then come back to it with my merciless Bremner persona, red pen ready to slash.

The other method is to really listen and think when I interview people. Even journalists – who are professional listeners as well as writers – sometimes get lazy as they take in the answers to their questions. I try to remember to ask, at least once during any given interview, some version of the question: “What the hell does that mean?” More diplomatically than that, of course. For example, the other day a CIO was explaining to me a strategic move that his company made. “They were charged to come back with a change in communication initiatives to drive better alignment for not only the IT organization, but also drive better alignment for the enterprise.” I was able to partially translate as: “I asked them to tell me how .. .” but I had no idea what he meant by better alignment. So I asked. His answer got into important details that enabled me to write a much more interesting and useful story for the reader.

Whether the reader is a magazine subscriber or a customer, that should always be the goal.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of journalism is the opportunity to talk to a broad spectrum of people. Not only talk, but ask them questions. And hear them answer. Or not.

It can be fascinating – and frustrating – when a source either can’t or won’t answer your questions. Rarely will he outright admit that – although I have been hung up on a few times. More typical is that he agrees to the interview but then engages you in a game of rhetorical gymnastics. It doesn’t take long into the interview before any good journalist can smell the rat. Here are a variety of ways people I’ve interviewed have avoided answering my questions:

The one-track mind: There’s the source that agrees to the interview, but ignores your questions and launches into promoting his agenda. Regardless of what question you ask, he’ll somehow bring it back around to the idea he wants to promote.

The weak-in-the-knees source: He’ll answer your questions, not with a yes or a no, but with a “maybe” or “it depends.” He doesn’t want to express any strong opinion or ultimate truth, for fear of offending somebody.

The motor-mouth:  After your first question, the source is off on his soapbox, talking his agenda, and you can’t get another question in before your time is up.

The down-the-rabbit-hole source:  These are sources who won’t or can’t dumb it down enough for the average Jane to understand. You ask how something works, and before you know it you’re deep in a PowerPoint presentation with complicated graphs and acronyms that make your head spin. I sometimes suspect that engineers secretly relish subjecting journalists to this treatment.

The back-asswords source: This is the guy who will not say something outright, but backs into it with a lot of double-negatives and passive construction. When you rephrase what he’s essentially saying in direct, active language, what he’s said becomes too bold and blatant, and he won’t admit that’s what he means. He can truthfully say, “that’s not what I said,” even if parsing through the meandering construction would show that’s what he means.

This recent exchange with the head of a technology industry trade association illustrates several of the above methods:

Journalist:  “The employment numbers look bad. This industry has lost 100,000 jobs in the last five years, and the government predicts that it will lose another 146,000 in the next decade. Do you agree with those government numbers?”

Source:  Assuming that the U.S. government takes some action that allows this industry to be competitive, then we’ll maintain our position, we won’t lose any more jobs.

Journalist:  So you’re saying that you disagree with those government statistics?

Source:  No, I’m saying that we can remain competitive.

Journalist:  But that’s assuming that the government will change its policies. Is there any evidence that the government is going to change its policies?

Source:  There’s always hope.

Journalist:  But given a lack of any changes, then you would agree that the industry will lose 146,000 jobs?

Source:  Assuming that the government has its statistics right.

Journalist:  Do you think the statistics are wrong?

Source:  I’m saying that this industry will not lose those jobs if we have the right policies in place so we can remain competitive.

Journalist :  Aaargh . . . . . !

Frustrating, and fascinating.

I’m a print addict. I print everything except the most ethereal e-mail. When I write a story, I proof it in print before sending it to my editor. When I edit a story, I print out the writer’s initial draft and mark it with pen and ink first. If I need to read a 20-page market research report in a PDF, I’ll print it out. If someone sends me a PowerPoint deck that has 40 slides, all with solid black backgrounds that will suck every last drop from that $30 HP inkjet cartridge, I’ll print it. Read the rest of this entry »

Rob O’Regan of EMedia Vitals recently posted a query on LinkedIn, drawing my attention to this New York Times story:

Web Traffic (or Lack of) May Be a Reason for a Columnist’s Dismissal Read the rest of this entry »