Is Googling a new journalist’s name fair?

Curiously, I’ve read several articles recently by editors looking to employ journalists full time or freelance who’ve said that the first thing they do is search for the applicant’s name and ‘journalist’, and if they aren’t the first link that Google throws up, they’ll delete the application. It came up in the Guardian’s recent web chat about freelance writing, for example. The point is about the importance of SEO in writing today – something I find quite sad but, as an ex-editor, can understand.

I’m not sure there is such a thing as ‘good’ SEO, which is when writing is crafted to maximise search engine visibility without affecting the quality of the work or the message of what you have to say, although I do tend to practice it where nowadays whether a commission for a website specifically asks for it or not. At least I do where it’s relevant – in things like reviews and short news stories, not so much the long form stuff.

It’s just a fact of writing online now.

I find it the editors in question (I won’t link to them here) attitude a bit disheartening though. After all, what if you have a surname like, oh, I don’t know, say… ‘Oxford’. All the SEO skills in the world are going to struggle against the might of the University Press when it comes to getting top links, especially given all the authors in history whose works get listed as “Surname, Adam (Oxford)”. Google doesn’t really recognise brackets you see, but an editor looking to carve through CVs isn’t going to think of that.

It’s only because I have a very large and well established portfolio of writing that I tend to float to the top when googling my name these days. It took years for that to happen.

If I was just starting out my name would, apparently, hamper my ability to get hired. I’d like to think that that would be a bit short sighted of a potential employer.

Specialise and innovate

Just playing around with Picasa's focal B&W effect here

Barcelona, yesterday.

I’ve just returned from Avaya‘s partner conference in Barcelona*, the annual get together for the telecoms vendor and high ranking members of its EMEA supply chain. I don’t, as a general rule, go along to these things often as it’s a long time out of the office, and it’s rarer that I blog about them. But it is good to go along every once in a while too meet old contacts and discover new ones. I also find that when you have a group of senior execs together they tend to be more, rather than less, open about what goes on inside a company.

I’ve never been to Barcelona before, and the CCIB conference centre is not, I imagine, particularly representative of the rest of the city. Less Gaudi, more gaudy, and ever so slightly souless at this time of year when it’s cold and there’s no-one in the streets. Lots of tall hotels and big concrete plazas, not many old churches down here.

I’m writing up a couple of features about the conference for Comms Dealer, which I’ll link to once they’re done, but there was an interesting message that the company was keen to convey that I think is appropriate for this place.

First – a bit of background. Avaya is an old-school telecoms company, which was spun out of AT&T via Lucent a decade ago and sells an enormous number of phones and phone systems into small businesses. Last year, it bought Nortel, another company with its roots in Bell, but which was more concerned with large scale corporate communications and networking. Nortel was the kind of company which gets called in to cable up the Olympic games, for example.

Joining the two companies up – ‘integrating’ in borg-speak – hasn’t been easy, but it’s generally accepted that Avaya has dealt with the complications pretty well. Knowing, for example, when and where to drop a product line from one company which is essentially a competitor for a product from the other company without upsetting existing customers is very much an art rather than a science. Mistakes have and will be made, but some leeway is allowed.

This process is coming to an end for Avaya, though, and it’s keen to move on. And in order to do that, the message it gave to its partners in Barcelona is one that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Wikinomics or Adam Westbrook‘s Next Generation Journalist writings. Specialise, innovate, differentiate was the mantra. Learn your market and your customers well, become an expert in a small field, don’t sell a broad range of product just because you can.

The argument which sounded very familiar to me was that it’s the innovative companies that are successful. Innovation drives growth, partners were told. The question posed was: you can walk up to a CIO and offer to cut their costs, or demonstrate that you understand their business and caan transform it to make it more effective while still cutting costs – which approach do you think will win the contract?

I think this advice and example cuts across all fields at the moment. Whether it’s business, journalism, interational development… it’s the same argument that crops up time and again. I’m also the worst offender for not taking the advice – I often have a scattergun approach to projects I’ll take on driven by personal interest rather than a desire to develop a niche. But hearing the same advice I’ve heard from journalists and photographers I admire greatly in the formal world of a business conference does make me wonder if I should rethink.

*In the interests of disclosure Avaya covered the cost of transport and accomodation.

Published and be read

Journalism.co.uk has an interesting story up about this man, Michalis Pantelouris, a freelance journalist who had that very familiar problem of knowing he had a good story on his hands, but wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. So he crowdsourced his article about a German singer’s death in Athens, publishing 110 pages of research via his website until he came to the kernel of truth that he needed to sell it into an editor. Brilliant, different and very much the future of journalism many of us are hoping for.

Free training course at the cij

I can’t bang on enough about how good the Centre for Investigative Journalism‘s summer school was, and how much it’s helped to focus my own feelings about my career. So it’s rather excellent news that they’re holding a one-off, free class on the evening of October 13th on the subject ‘How to read public accounts’.

I presume this is related to the fact that the same class was cancelled during the summer school because the speaker, Sally Gainsbury of the Health Service Journal and Nursing Times, was off ill. Whatever the reason, it’s an enormously generous gesture and one which I’d urge anyone with a bit of free time to take up. Especially if, like me, you’ve recently been staring at hundreds of spreadsheets of local government finance data and felt a little out of your depth.

Tickets are free, but there’s limited numbers. Sign up at the cij spreadsheet here.