Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
After going through this guide, you should understand the importance of original reporting, recognize when and how to use sources and evaluate their credibility.
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Google said in 2019 that original reporting was an “important element” of the coverage it wants to provide.
The search giant said at the time that it had changed both its algorithm and its guidelines for its human search raters to help it better “recognize original reporting, surface it more prominently in Search and ensure it stays there longer.”
To understand more the role these search rates play in SEO, check out our module on E-E-A-T.
This update to their algorithm has massive implications for ranking news articles. If an article is deemed to be an original or comprehensive source for the topic, Google will reward that page with a higher position in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
The update came in response to a mushrooming of tech platforms and news aggregators that gathered news from different sources and republished them, cornering the bulk of the news traffic in the process.
This meant that small news publishers pushing out original news reports struggled to rank well on Google despite being the original source of a news item because they lacked the resources of large news aggregators.
A 2019 study found that more than 80% of all Apple News content came from just 20 large publishers who were republishing original reporting from smaller publishers and cornering the resulting traffic bump.
As already discussed, Google wants to prioritize original sources of news, even if they are small local publishers, over tech-enabled aggregators and large outlets that simply republish news.
However, there are additional benefits beyond Google’s desire to surface the original story tellers.
Original reporting helps build backlinks. If your content is the original source of a particular news item or statistic, it is very likely that other websites will cite your content as part of their coverage.
This can help you to improve your ranking in the SERPs and attract more visitors from other sources.
While not strictly an SEO benefit, original reporting contributes to your site’s expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, factors that can help your site stand out from competitors.
Consistently creating unique content encourages readers to return to your site, share your articles with others and even subscribe.
While E-E-A-T doesn’t directly affect where a site ranks on Google’s SERPs, applying the principles can indirectly boost your site’s SEO. For more on E-E-A-T, see our detailed module here.
Creating original content can be challenging, which is why Google seeks to reward it. Below are some of the main challenges publishers face with original reporting:
One of the most fundamental issues with producing original reporting is funding and staffing. To dedicate sufficient time and resources to reporting, publishers need access to enough skilled and dedicated journalists who can actively engage with communities and produce quality content.
The resourcing challenge also feeds into the increasing pace of content creation, which has been driven by the rise of content consumption on mobile devices and social media platforms.
As we’ve noted, original content costs money and publishers need a mature monetization strategy to fund this. Given rising competition, smaller publishers are increasingly struggling to attract ad spend and subscribers.
Publishers can syndicate their content, but this also leads to copyrights and licensing challenges, which can increase costs for both parties involved. Such persistent licensing issues have led Google to develop Google News Showcase, through which Google pays publishers licensing fees to showcase their stories
Staying up-to-date on rapidly evolving technologies is another challenge. Technological advancements such as mobile devices and social media platforms allow publishers to reach larger audiences than ever, but this also creates a challenge in monetization in terms of fracturing the audience.
Original content is key to any good publisher marketing strategy. By providing the audience with new and useful information, you can keep them coming back for more.
Listed below are the key components of developing high-quality original reporting.
With breaking news stories, article speed to publish is an important metric. You need to strive to publish a short snippet immediately within 5-15 minutes of a news story breaking.
However, you can’t afford for this to come at the cost of research or factual accuracy. Once the dust has begun to settle, only the most well-researched and informative articles will stay at the top of the SERPs.
Thus while publishing quickly is important, it doesn’t automatically guarantee that Google will continue to reward the first article to appear. Once that article is live it’s important to continue to update it live while also looking for ways to leverage existing content to improve your news story’s authority.
This leads nicely to…
As we’ve noted, a key principle of effective reporting is linking to older articles to build that topical authority and retain your spot in the SERPs for longer. This strategy directs more traffic to the site and encourages readers to return and engage with more of your content.
To best implement this approach, it’s important that you tailor the links to fit within the existing content. Including short summaries or snippets from each article will help draw readers in, while also maintaining a content structure that is easy to follow.
As noted, publisher resources are often limited and using existing content will buy you the time you need to develop your original reporting on an event.
Refreshing your headline whenever a new development emerges is a long-established reporting strategy. The process not only briefs readers on the story’s latest developments but also keeps your content fresh in Google’s eyes.
If you fail to do this then there’s a very real risk that your readers will not return to the article over a perceived lack of timely coverage. For this reason, it’s important to use various techniques — such as machine learning — to identify trending topics, revise headlines and adjust article content accordingly.
Original reporting is time consuming and resource intensive, which means publishers should develop clusters around original stories. This will allow them to continue building on the topic even after the story has been published.
This approach also has the added advantage of allowing you to fully flesh out a topic — something not possible from publishing one or two stories or on a topic and then moving on.
For example, you might explore a particular issue by looking at its historical context, examining its social and economic impact, mapping where it has occurred, or studying the responses of key stakeholders.
Once the story has been published, you can then follow various angles and side stories you didn’t have room for in the main story. Even though these are independent reports in their own right, they remain connected to the main topic. This allows you to develop your topical authority around the topic.
For more information around the pillar cluster strategy, please see our module on the topic.
There are two parts to reporting news accurately — analyzing your sources meticulously, and then listing all your sources.
You can produce reliable, transparent, well-documented original reporting by carefully analyzing and reviewing your sources, verifying all information and cross-checking your facts and statistics. Additionally, careful fact-checking can help uncover unexpected details or connections that might otherwise go unnoticed.
That’s the first half of it.
The second half involves meticulously listing your sources. The more sources you list, the greater the credibility your reporting is afforded. This is especially important in an age when readers are becoming increasingly skeptical of all forms of media. Even reputable publications have a hard time gaining peoples’ trust.
Sources are of two types — primary and secondary.
Primary sources include first-person accounts, interviews, oral histories, etc. Other primary sources include legal transcripts, proceedings of courts and tribunals, letters, wills and testaments, etc.
Secondary sources are those which are at one remove from the scene of action. These could include books, research papers, websites, etc.
Whatever your source, first analyze it, and once you decide to include it in your reporting, remember to cite/reference it. When in doubt, cite.
We’ve seen the importance of referencing and citing sources. However, it is equally important to pay attention to the quality of the sources we use. There are several methods to find credible sources, including databases or searching for articles published in scholarly journals.
If you are unsure about the credibility of a source, you can ask an expert or consult a fact-checking website.
Examples of credible sources include:
When developing original reporting, one of the best strategies is approaching a topic from a unique perspective. By looking at the same issue from different angles and viewpoints, you can uncover new insights that may not have been considered.
Let’s consider these two groundbreaking stories about the tech industry to gain a better understanding of this concept.:
Douglas Macmillan’s article was published in March 2012 by Bloomberg. It was one of the earliest uses of the term Brogrammer, and the story drew attention to the exclusively male sub-culture within the tech industry.
In 2012, a time when several of today’s tech unicorns such as Uber and AirBnB were still in their infancy, and most tech stories focused on valuations, possibilities and potential, looking at the tech industry through the gender perspective was a fresh approach that made readers sit up and take notice.
Kieran Snyder’s article was published in 2014 by Fortune Magazine built on earlier, foundational work on gender bias in the tech industry to conduct a deepdive into the state of women in tech and come up with solid numbers to back its findings.
It reported that nearly 30% of female employees in the tech industry left their jobs because they found the culture to be toxic. This story built on the slowly accumulating body of work on the topic in preceding years and took it a step further through the use of data-driven insights combined with original reporting.
Having covered the essentials of original reporting in the previous section, we can now look at additional areas that help develop quality reporting that is also optimized for search engines.
Keywords are important because they help direct search engine traffic to your content and ensure that it is found and understood by others. They also provide valuable information, allowing us to target specific audiences or create a certain effect with our writing.
For detailed information on the importance of headlines for SEO, and how to optimize your titles and headlines to drive more traffic to your content, see our course module on titles and headlines.
Your content will not reach its audience if it doesn’t rank well on web searches. This is why it is important to optimize your content for search engines. While Google is the most popular search engine, others such as Bing also command a considerable share of the search engine market.
To gain an edge over your competitors, it is important to optimize for Bing along with Google. See our module on Bing PubHub to learn how to optimize news for Bing.
Besides following the tips suggested above, news publishers should try to avoid these common pitfalls for best results.
Scraping is the unauthorized use of another person’s work for digital or online purposes. This can include copying text, images, or other types of digital media without permission from the original creator.
Many publishers and news organizations now block scraped content through various techniques to protect original reporting and avoid copyright infringement issues. These techniques may include filtering software that screens out known scrapers, warnings or take-down requests sent to offending websites or users or legal action against repeat offenders.
Ultimately, scraping poses a significant threat to independent content creators and the integrity of original online reporting.
There are cases where publishers may need to borrow or republish information from other sites. In such cases it is important to correctly and accurately cite the sources from which the information has been borrowed.
This can be done either by hyperlinking to the original source or by manually citing the source or both.
Here is a good resource on best practices for citing sources.
Publishers who own a network of websites may sometimes end up republishing content on their own websites. Since Google News uses algorithms to sift out duplicate content, it may have difficulty verifying the source of the republished content. To avoid this, use the rel=”canonical” HTML tag in your page’s source code when republishing content on your websites.
This tag tells Google that the specified URL is the original source of the content and the others with similar content have been derived from it. This has two benefits:
Here’s how this tag can be implemented in HTML:
This code tells Googlebot that the link specified after the “canonical” tag is the master copy and other links with similar content are its duplicates. This information tells the crawler not to crawl the additional links as often and to avoid penalizing them for being copies.
Let’s take a quick look at a couple of examples of publishers that have excelled at original reporting to see what lessons we can take away from their approaches.
The Tampa Bay Times is a relatively small newspaper serving the Tampa Bay Area in Florida, US. It is owned by the non-profit organization Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
Despite its humble grounding, the Tampa Bay Times has won 21 Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, including two in a single year. Its most recent Pulitzer award was in 2022 for an original investigative story about toxic leakage in a major Florida battery recycling facility that forced authorities to impose stricter safety norms.
Poisoned was first published in March 2021 in a three-part series, with the final part being published in December of that year.
Here are a few things that make this story stand out as a brilliant piece of original reporting:
The reporters — Corey G. Johnson, Rebecca Woolington and Eli Murray — spent several months researching the story. They interviewed more than 100 workers at the facility, consulted over 65 experts and even went to the extent of becoming certified lead inspectors to enrich their understanding of the topic.
Besides primary research, they performed extensive secondary research including analyzing Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidelines in detail and examining more than 100,000 pages of documents including consultant reports, medical records and company emails.
The lesson here for small publishers is that even if they lack the resources to conduct primary research, good quality secondary research carries the potential to develop original stories.
Instead of publishing the results of this detailed investigation in one long report, the Tampa Bay Times chose to publish it in a three-part series lasting from March to December 2021. This ensured maximum exposure of the content over the course of the year, while also allowing the team to build on the same content over a considerable period of time.
The Tampa Bay Times did not invest years of time, money and energy into developing a three-part story, releasing it on the internet and washing their hands with it. They used the research, expertise and insights accumulated in the process to create more than 20 articles on the topic of lead factory poisoning and its implications, which they continued to publish over the course of 2021.
This approach allowed the publisher to build a cluster that not only resulted in optimal content usage, but also allowed a fuller exploration of the topic, building topical authority in the process.
The Minnesota Star Tribune is a medium-sized newspaper with a print circulation of a little more than 100,000 and serves the State of Minnesota in the American midwest. As with several other traditional publishers, the Star Tribune struggled with monetization in a digital world, with the result being that it was forced to file for bankruptcy protection in 2009.
However, the paper has always relied on original reporting as its hallmark, and this is a strategy that helped it reinvent itself.
In 2021, the Star Tribune published a four-part report titled Unsettled: Cashing in On Accident Victims, which exposed the unfair practices of settlement purchasers who persuade accident victims awarded settlement payments to exchange future monthly payments in return for a one-time cash settlement.
The story was awarded the Barlett and Steele Award for Business Journalism conferred each year by the Arizona State University.
Here are a few things that stand out about this story:
Lack of resources and funding to deploy large teams to conduct primary research in inaccessible places is one of the biggest challenges that small publishers face in developing original reporting. The Minnesota Star Tribune’s award-winning investigation demonstrated that ground-breaking, original reporting can be based almost entirely upon publicly available data as well.
For their investigation, the Star Tribune’s staff studied more than 1,700 settlement filings in Minnesota over the last two decades. Since settlements to buy payments are public record, this data was freely available. The difference here was in the Star Tribune’s approach to the data.
It is important to note that Star Tribune clearly explained the methodology it used to collect data, analyze it and arrive at their conclusions, listing all the sources it consulted in the process.
The lesson for small publishers is that high-profile original stories can exist in even the most mundane of settings. The Minnesota Star Tribune, being a relatively small publisher, could only afford to assign a team of three to sift through thousands of settlement records.
Smaller publishers who may not possess even such resources can still find original stories in easily accessible settings that can be researched and reported with even fewer resources. Not every Pulitzer-award winning story comes from the war in Afghanistan or is an exposé of high finance on Wall Street.
Researching and producing a story on a topic as niche as unethical practices in settlement payments in one thing. Presenting the large volumes of data it is based on in a narrative form that engages the average reader is quite another. This is another area where the Star Tribune excelled.
It visually represented the vast amount of data in the form of a full-page interactive graph. The Y-axis represented a recipient’s lump sum payment, while the X-axis represented the percentage of their original compensation this payment amounted to.
Each dot in the graph represented a person who had sold their settlement for a one-time payment.
This kind of interactive data presentation and visualization would never have been possible in print format.
This is a perfect example of a publication, which went bankrupt a little over a decade ago because it struggled to adapt to the digital format, mastering the digital format and leveraging it to realize its full potential.
As with the previous case study, the Minnesota Tribune also published its findings in a serial format to ensure the story remained in the public eye for a longer time.
Original reporting is an important aspect of news SEO because it helps to establish your site as a credible source of information.
While original reporting can require considerable investment in terms of time and effort, Google seeks to reward it by trying to hero it in its SERPS .
Having finished this lesson, you should now be comfortable enough with the concepts of original reporting to examine strategies to integrate into your own editorial workflow.
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