We are entering an age where publishers are becoming “Digital Windsocks”, following the audience and the advertising revenue, damaging reputations and quality of content quality in the wake.

The role of a journalist is evolving to include a greater understanding of search engine optimisation and interpreting data, but in the effort to appeal to search engines, is quality journalism suffering?

Yesterday, an Association of Online Publishers (AOP) forum brought together an expert panel to examine the editorial impact of SEO and to look at what the future for news production might be.

Andrew Currah, lecturer for Reuters Institute of Journalism at Oxford University, and author of ‘What’s Happening to Our News’, which examines the changing business of journalism in the digital age, introduced the concept of a Digital Windsock.

Currah said now there is a focus to accumulate attention around news to build advertising revenue. Publishers are chasing clicks, but have no clear sense of how much the digital audience is worth or when digital revenues will recoup the costs of multimedia integration.

According to recent trends, most commercial news website traffic enters through a “side door” of search results and RSS feeds, leaving the site within a matter of minutes.

In the UK, 30% of time spent online is on 10 URLs or less, none of these are commercial news sites.

During his research Currah found that new forms of reading are emerging. People now power browse, looking horizontally through titles and a few lines down the left side of the content, scouring for anything of interest, before moving on.

He also found that publishers are now frequently looking towards experimental methods to take advantage of the user “clickstream” some even turning to neuroscience to measure the subconscious foundations of the web user.

Publishers at the Guardian, Al-jazeera and the Times have recently experimented with an open-source approach to their websites, allowing the user to control and shape the content they want.

However, Currah warns of a dark side to the innovation and the pursuit of clicks, such as what happens to quality when content is shaped for the digital crowd, will new techniques like SEO lead to softening of the news agenda and will publishers continue to funnel resources into keywords instead of newsbreaking content?

The evidence is already apparent that the news agenda is as soft as butter. Scanning the ‘Most Popular/Most Read’ story lists from national news websites, it becomes clear that reader attention is concentrated around quirky content, clicks can give a good indication of audience interest and boredom, and the immediacy of clickstream is starting impact editorial decision making.

Currah predicts that the future will see a division between the Windsocks and The Anchors; those handful of publishers able to resist lure of clickstream.

However, it is certain that navigating the clickstream whilst maintaining editorial standards will require some sort of economic shelter, and it’s inevitable that Anchor publishers will provide this by using a mix of paid-for-content and advertising revenue.

It’s a combination that works, in my opinion, and I don’t think the Windsock concept is totally lost on the readers themselves. Those wanting unbiased, quality news content will pay for it if necessary, leaving the quirkiness and frivolous to those that don’t charge.

I’d like to highlight some useful Henry Jenkins research via whatconsumesme. Rather than tackling tedious definitions of ‘viral’, Henry explains the various motives behind why people spread media:

-  They are doing so because the brand expresses something about themselves or their community.

-  They are doing so because the brand message serves some valued social function.

-  They are doing so because the entertainment content gives expressive form to some deeply held perception or feeling about the world.

-  They are doing so because individual responses to such content helps them determine who does or does not belong in their community.

On this it’s also worth talking about emotional currency.  We spread media in seconds via Twitter or email and we mustn’t forget that we often do so for the selfish reason of how something makes us immediately feel.  Dosh Dosh wrote an interesting article back in July which in some depth discussed the emotional reasons behind spreading media, be it joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust. The truth is the ‘key’ to spreadable media falls in murky depths, somewhere between combining emotional engagement, an individual’s perceptual/communal reasoning for spreading media and brand messaging. The further we move away from the idea that spreadable media is “dancing kittens on boobies” the better. It’s growing out of teenage bedrooms and the potential advertising has to be a positive force in the world in enabling worthwhile conversations is being realised.

Where does internet meme fall into all this? Debunking the idea that content should be memetic, Jenkins adds:

“Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture.”

A very useful addition to existing remix culture discussions.

Jenkins also talks about the “human agency” in cultures, inherently describing them as something we collectively create. Letting people mess with your content builds brand culture, giving people a stake in its spread and ensures its sustainable awesomeness. Ad-vacate to advocate.