This is a pertinent topic, which print journalists I talk to are really trying to get to grips with (largely unsuccessfully!).

I'm a huge advocate for what online conversations, dialogue and interaction can do, but I'm going to stick my neck out here and say it's not quite as simple in the case of newspapers.

Of course the social media models are of huge potential value to print-birthed news organisations, but let's not forget that their paper audiences have formed in different ways to the online first communities we are all familiar with. In this respect they should be treated differently, aorund a different set of needs wants and values.

While there is still any value left in the 'pay for a newspaper' model, broadsheets need to balance growing and developing online communities with providing cutting edge, authoritative insight people trust and want to buy.

This is surely why the WSJ and The Guardian are not ruling out the FT model of charging for their news online as well as in print (and that's a whole other discussion).

Were they to go the free route of course, the broadsheets would be hard pushed to justify allegations of dumbing down or selling out. So long as readers are prepared to pay for news they value, the two tier model of premium and free news will continue?

Thanks for flagging this up anyway, it's sure to run and run.

You'd think there would be more opportunity for newspaper companies to facilitate bridging the gap between the print world with the online world. The newspaper industry is going to eventually change it's content to reflect the new flows of information, don't you think?

There's no doubt that there will be more to the success of 'newspapers' than just SEO. But I would still argue that if you want people to find the content you want them to talk about then they need to be able to do that via search engines.

Yes social is important, yes Twitter is changing the world, but Google's audience, and the investment that Microsoft has just made in Bing, highlights how central these services still are to the way that people find content.

I realise that your post doesn't say that papers shouldn't do SEO, but the way it's phrased might lead some to believe that that's what you mean. Which, ironically, would of course lead to you getting lots of lovely links.
:)

Hey Ciaran - I really wasn't trying to imply that newspapers (or anyone else) shouldn't take SEO very very seriously (not enough companies do!), or to intentionally create linkbait (however serendipdous that would have been).

However SEO, like paid search, doesn't create demand, it just forfils it. So they are going to have to do more than this...

SEO is also a very long process with regards to seeing results. What really makes the difference is the SMO side of things in which links to their content are spread virally throughout platforms such as twitter. However, even this is somewhat marred with the inception of URL shorteners.

Twitter however, does act as the perfect platform for engaging an active audience in order to gain concise opinions and responses. Do people still seek out information? Trending tools and feeds now bring the topics to me and this is something that papers are going to need to learn.

Who needs papers when you have #hashtags? and http://fav.or.it?

It is true though. If you throw some bread onto the streets of London then the pigeons will eventually come and toss copious crums to more pigeons.

Rhys makes an interesting point about the spread of links via social media platforms such as Twitter - I was recently at an SEO conference where someone suggested that people should remove the 'Tweet This' links from their blogs as it discourages 'proper' linking. The battle to balance search & social is only just starting and is likely to keep getting more interesting, at least until Google works out how to make proper use of the social graph.