SEO Headlines and the typos that render them useless

Have you ever eaten at a Behihana restaurant? I haven’t either. Maybe it’s because they don’t exist.

But according to the headline on the South Florida Business Journal’s Web site, their second quarter sales are slightly up.  You can probably guess that they meant to type Benihana, the popular cook-the-asian-food-in-front-of-you-with-flaming-vegetables restaurant based in Miami. Minor typo really, but the location of the typo in the headline is pivotal.

The thing that gets me is that no one has noticed the error and made the change.  Isn’t that the beauty of online publication? Typos and errors aren’t glued to the page forever. Fixes are easy!

It’s not just the sillyness of spelling a word incorrectly or getting someone’s age wrong.  Incorrect headlines eliminate the ease of searching for stories with keywords.  SEO out the window.  The publication doesn’t just look bad, but your readers are paying the price.

**UPDATE: It just dawned on me that I sent them a resume about a month or so ago for an online content editor position of some sort.  I’m still available if they want me!

Audio/Visual storytelling from Good Magazine

It’s amazing what can happen when you tell a story different ways. Ben Jervey, reporter for Good Magazine, knows that the United States’ rail system isn’t much to write home about compared to it’s international counterparts. But why? He jumped on the Amtrak for the 3,397-mile journey from New York’s Penn Station to Oakland, California to find out what America’s rails are up to these days. With a mix of still photographs, video footage and a written story that reads like a personal journal, “Train in Vain” shows, at minimum, the dynamic capabilities of a good ol’ American travel story.

(photo by Amy Stein via GoodMagazine.com)

The Sun Sentinel tells Brendan’s story

None of us who know Brendan will ever forget the moment when we heard about his accident. The tale of the ricocheting cars colliding on our familiar South Florida highway and the nightmare that began to unfold, and continues to evolve now, three years later.

Most of us remember Brendan this way -

Brendan’s wonderfully loving and dedicated family now cope with rehabilitating a son that is lost inside his own damaged brain, the result of a crash that broke bones in his face and leg and caused one of his lungs to collapse.  Brendan now lives in a nursing home in Ft. Lauderdale and remains in a vegetative state, or “waking coma.”

Sun Sentinel reporter Tom Collie and photographer Susan Stocker documented the day-to-day struggles that Brendan’s family deals with by compiling their information in a multimedia package to accompany the print story that ran as a special report in Sunday’s paper.  The package contained a cleanly edited five-minute video overview of Brendan’s story, with footage of his rehabilitation, home-video of Brendan before his accident and interviews with several friends and family members.  The most touching one comes from his mom, a cherished friend of the community surrounding my high school (everyone loves Mrs. James), who has remained by her son’s side to this day.  Readers can put themselves in her shoes by reading through the archive of e-mails she has sent over the years, providing detailed updates on Brendan’s condition.  They also included a click-through Flash diagram of different ways the brain can be damaged from excessive force from traumatic events like car accidents.

It would be difficult to remain un-biased in a critique of this package.  I was so pleased at the job the Sentinel did with the story of such a beloved friend.  By including the various multimedia features they did Brendan justice by using the right tools to tell his story in the most complete way.

(photos by Susan Stocker)

Multimedia Critique: “How technology is revolutionizing democracy” by CNN

I haven’t picked apart one of these online packages in a while and I think it is a useful process because it constantly reminds me, as both a user and aspiring creator, what works and what doesn’t.

Today we look at what CNN calls an interactive peice that highlights certain average Joes who have made a name for themselves by using communication technology, social networking and blogging to have a voiced impact on politics. There are seven tabs with the names of people that were interviewed at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York on June 23 and 24, and clicking on one of the tabs brings up the person’s videotaped soundbyte on the right, with a pulled quote from that soundbyte in text on the left.

What Works

Let’s start on a positive note. It’s a nice idea that CNN’s i-reporters have the means and equipment to take video cameras to events like this and capture the spirit of the discussions there. It was nice to see what Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com looks like in person, and I thought the best responses came from both him and from Jay Rosen, a journalism professor from NYU and blogger at PressThink.org. I could be biased in that statement, for obvious journalism connections, but the two professors had the least repetitive and most thought-provoking responses.

What Needs Work

From a technical standpoint, the consistency in the video player was absent. Sometimes the “play” button wouldn’t turn into a “pause” button and I wouldn’t see a moving playhead along the progress bar. Personally, I like to know once I hit play how long the video will run, and this sometimes happened and sometimes didn’t. This was a minor problem, probably just a tiny glitch in the button script somewhere, but a tad frustrating nonetheless.

I had a small problem with this section of the peice being called “Interactive.” As we were taught in several online journalism courses by professor Mindy McAdams, interactivity requires input and output. A user can put in some sort of information or query in order to get information in return. Using a database to feed a map on crime in your neighborhood after you input your address is interactive. Seven video clips, while considered multimedia, falls very short of any interactivity. Perhaps their logic was that the i-reporter had to interact with the interviewees in order to record the video, but that would be a stretch. I’m not arguing that the content is bad or unnecessary, just that it’s mislabelled.

Thoughts?

NY Times Design Director answers your questions

Recently the New York Times has been asking its head honchos to take to the mail bag and answer some of their readers most pressing questions in a section called “Talk to the Newsroom.” Executive Editor Bill Keller and head editors from almost every section have taken part in the column, and this week interactive design guru Khoi Vinh is the latest to give us some insight into what the Times does and why they do it.

I could really quote the entire Q & A page because everything he says should be echoed in newsrooms everywhere, even the small-town papers. His best summary sentence:

We’re trying to create something that’s true to this medium, that borrows the best of what works in print and that takes advantage of the unique aspects of digital media.

He also co-authored a design tutorial called “Grids are Good” that was presented at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference last year. Once you go grid, it’s hard to go back.