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Previously in The Content Technologist:

Traffic for traffic’s sake is a bad way to make money (2019). Minneapolis goes through it once (2020). Privacy is critical to remember when collecting audience data (2021). Minneapolis goes through it again (2026). We get angry. We cope. Our strong journalism and civically minded culture helps us orient and survive. At the Online News Association conference, news executives talk about AI (2026).

The frightening partnership of USA Today and Palantir

Journalists reporting on the massively successful analytics company Palantir tend to stick to its government contracts, which are frighteningly broad and opaque to the average American. Described this week in The Verge as “giant, data-sucking squid,” Palantir’s rapid expansion into American law enforcement and government operations has been cause for alarm.

What flies relatively under the radar is Palantir’s growth into American private industry. While military contracts are the focus of most news investigations, Palantir’s commercial contracts this year have nearly caught up with its government partnerships: per its quarterly earnings report, $764 million, or 48% of Q2 revenue, came from private-industry deals.

On August 6, USA Today Co. announced a partnership with Palantir in its quarterly earnings report, prompting a strong protest from the country’s largest journalism union, the NewsGuild. Reporting from news trade publications has echoed the Guild’s concerns about AI-generated text replacing workers, without specifically naming how Palantir’s products would actually be used. On August 19, the Guild organized a minor walkout (a “coordinated lunch break,” per the union’s website) with the tagline “no slop in our shops.”

Messaging from journalists and their union is relatively focused on the impact of genAI on the news product itself: the writing, the correctness and depth of its factual content, and its originality. There’s an undertone of “the audience will lose trust in the journalism” because of LLM-generated text, and based on current popular opinion of AI from the people most likely to read news, that’s a good prediction.

But the collaboration reflects a much bigger, more frightening spectre: Palantir, a private company willing to cooperate on building surveillance tools with the American government, likely has access to the personally identifiable information and news-reading behavior of—if USA Today Co.’s own reports are true—158 million average unique monthly visitors, or roughly 48% of the American people.*

What could Palantir do with that data? In their August 6 earnings call, USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed said it will “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform.” I’ve sat through many ad tech, AI, and software demos over the past decade plus, and I’ve been an adviser on tactics like “more effective and faster monetization.” As the call went on, Reed described the worst possible outcome for a news organization partnering with a surveillance-enablement company: “Converting the sheer scale of our audience into known, orchestrated, first party relationships.”

To be clear: the CEO of the United States’ largest news publisher is comfortable giving the known, orchestrated first-party relationships of its audience to Palantir, the company that built a tool used to target immigrant neighborhoods in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge. That should raise red flags for media business wonks, journalism cheerleaders, and civil liberties warriors. We can’t be so beaten down with doomscrolling or slop or whatever that we lose the freedom to access and understand news about our communities.

What does Palantir’s Ontology product do?

In metaphysics, ontology is the study of being as it relates to the broader world. The term was introduced into the computer science community in the 80s and 90s to describe how AI systems could potentially relate concepts or entities. It’s a central concept in Tim Berners-Lee et al’s paper on the semantic web.

For the past few years, I’ve been steeped in semantic approaches to organizing data to be found by AI, and I’ve learned more about the construction of knowledge graphs, taxonomies, ontologies, and other semantic tools. These tools codify enterprise vocabularies and processes, applying language that connects business units and all manner of corporate operations. Many tech companies build their own taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs in-house, using semantic tools to audit and guide automated AI decision-making. Adding language and meaning guidelines to small language models can control hallucinations and reduce token expenses, making complex software more navigable through the use of an enterprise’s its own preferred language.

Palantir’s Foundry and Ontology products promise to help organize and analyze company data into a “dynamic foundation” to create “sovereign AI systems” per their website. They’re sold to executives across the country who—rightfully—are frightened of providing their company’s intellectual property and data wholesale to vendors like OpenAI and Anthropic. Executive buyers want shortcuts to efficiency and optimization without investing in building their own taxonomy and ontology software, a complex and time-consuming process that often involves months or years of deliberation from semantic geeks like me.

Palantir’s off-the-shelf Ontology product is a language layer that enables access and organization of enterprise data without the arduous process of agreeing on a company vocabulary. Instead of owning their own enterprise vocabulary, companies can just use Palantir’s language system instead. It would be a relatively innocuous product if it were created and sold by any other company.

For an executive frustrated that the promise of AI doesn’t meet the reality, a product like Ontology is perceived as a turnkey solution to navigating the hidden secrets of their data. They’re determined to find the magic solution without having to build it themselves. Deals with Palantir are happening now, across sectors, fueling the company’s massive scale, and before long they will be irreversible. Corporate software procurement processes are long and arduous. Once software is integrated into an enterprise, it is extremely hard to extract from a company’s operations, and that compounds when AI and semantic data are integrated. If Palantir data processing becomes as ubiquitous as Microsoft, Google, or Oracle in corporate software, it will take years to extract.

Pattern recognition: Media companies and privacy tech

Healthcare, finance, education, and credit bureaus have regulations on how users’ private data can be processed, making their collaborations with Palantir somewhat less frightening. Palantir, at this point, can’t violate HIPAA or FERPA without breaking the law. But there are no similar regulations controlling how media companies can process the immense amounts of personally identifying data. GDPR and CCPA cover limited regions and only regulate the specific case of selling user data to advertisers.

If this ill-considered collaboration were unprecedented, I would not be so concerned, but I’ve seen how vague language and publishers’ misunderstanding of tracking software enabled the rise of Google’s and Meta’s ad networks. I advise clients toward software solutions and anonymized analytics approaches that respect individual privacy, and I’ve long observed that publishers take less care with audience and customer data than other industries. They litter their sites with the pixels of any upstart ad network that promises more revenue. They buy into tech like “identity resolution” with little trepidation or thought about how that software might compromise individual privacy, often while their reporters decry more consumer-facing surveillance tech like doorbell cameras and apps.

In the early 2010s, companies like USA Today, formerly Gannett, took Google and Facebook at their word and dropped third-party ad pixels on their websites, so they could siphon off a tiny portion of ad revenue while enabling Google and Meta to build audience behavioral interest graphs directly from those pixels. Those interest graphs are used to coordinate and sell advertising: “right message, right time, right audience” has long been a chorus in ad sales pitches for media and tech companies alike. But on the media side, collaboration with big tech only meant they lost their moat: their unique audience was no longer their audience. It morphed into ad tech’s audience, where it remains.

USA Today Co. owns more than 100 U.S. news dailies, 1,000 weeklies, and is actively buying up struggling local news operations. A USA Today-owned paper is the only local news source in many U.S. communities. It runs the paper in my hometown, and there’s a good chance it runs yours. It operates papers in cities like El Paso, Texas; Alexandria and Shreveport, Louisiana; and Fort Collins, Colorado; all of which happen to be in close proximity to ICE detention centers.

Trusted brands give the news giant access to local audiences, who don’t pay much attention to ownership structures or the news business. They’re there to read about what’s going on in their communities. To access and pay for their news, they have to submit their email address and zip code information. They will never know they’re submitting that personally identifiable data to be processed by Palantir, just like they didn’t know that by reading the news they were giving their anonymized behavioral patterns to Google and Facebook ten years ago. They are just reading the news.

Enterprise legacy news companies are years behind on digital transformation compared with other Fortune 500s. USA Today Co. is just now realizing that quality-over-quantity might be the better move, after years of belatedly chasing lowest common denominator SEO terms. Their ham-fisted partnerships with ad tech companies have brought us innovations like chum and the “news” website whose per-page content/ad balance is somewhere around 15/85. They don’t have a good history of protecting, or even acknowledging, their audience’s privacy. Instead of building decent, uncluttered products, they will sell their audience’s behavioral data to whichever third-party solution makes the best pitch.

Do you trust Alex Karp and Peter Thiel?

When working in corporate content marketing, clients generally want their websites and communications to appear benign and safe. They don’t wish to attract controversy, so their product copy is banal and innocuous. Not so with Palantir, whose website contains some of the most wackadoo** phrases I’ve ever seen on a corporate site, like “Govern the human-agent labor force” and “AI sovereignty is your alpha.” Its marketing promises that customers will be free from the whims of big tech pricing and technical changes, while selling clients their proprietary systems.

Their target audience is, weirdly, “commercial enterprises in The West,” a segment that I’ve never seen named before in all my years of working with software and marketing.† Co-founder Peter Thiel is, historically, no friend of journalism and in years past, publicly made anti-democratic statements. CEO Alex Karp has a habit of dropping megalomaniacal political statements into Palantir corporate social media and shareholder letters. Their company is named after a magical evil surveillance tool from Lord of the Rings. In previous years, I would find the confluence of villain vibes laughable. In 2026, the potential for harm keeps me up at night.

“We stand on the walls, sentinels of the inner sanctum, against the assault of AI slop. The Ontology is based firmly in reality—there is, here, a dialectic between ground truth, tribal knowledge, and enhancements.”– Alex Karp, Palantir Q1 2026 shareholder letter.

[I went to a conference for ontologists this year, and I assure you: most semantic professionals do not sound anything like this guy.]

Unlike most MBA-trained CEOs, Karp is extremely aware of the power of language to communicate ideology and start political movements. Recently voted the least trustworthy AI leader in a CNBC survey of Gen Z respondents with a whopping 19% trustworthiness approval rating, Karp positions the Ontology product as an answer to “AI Slop,” a narrative conveniently aligned with the popular backlash against language generators. That his company’s biggest U.S. commercial product is a language-control tool should raise red flags—but tech and culture reporters seem to be more interested in Palantir’s branded merchandise than the potential of its software to define and control the vocabulary of American business and government.

Linguistic and technology behavioral shifts happen gradually, incrementally, over five or ten years. If a company were to optimize toward readability from Palantir’s Ontology product, it might change its language to reflect the words Palantir is already using. For example, in ten years, a consumer may be buying from an Ontology-powered home insurer. After requesting a quote, the customers who self-identify as being from The West are treated to lower rates than those not from The West. Hypothetically. With precedent.

American media companies are increasingly eyeing revenue-generation software that relies on surveillance pricing, adjusting subscription offers based on a referral link’s or customer id’s predicted income. They often don’t understand how the software works before signing the contract, then panic when the algorithms change. Publishers panic loudly at the loss of traffic-based ad and affiliate revenue from Google, drowning out conversation about building better products or exploring meaningful alternatives. They’re happy to align with another company that ensures that their intellectual property is “sovereign,” audience privacy be damned.

“Nobody talks about Palantir.”

Late last month I had lunch with another consultant in New York, who lists many major media companies as clients. We talked about how AI-first products might work with news consumers, and I gave them a rundown of what I’d heard at ONA. Toward the end of the conversation, I mentioned knowledge graphs and ontologies as a means to build better information products. I brought up the Palantir Ontology project, completely clueless about their previous deals with Fox News and Axel Springer. Was Palantir an emerging character in the news revenue scramble? I wondered. They shook their head: “Nobody talks about Palantir.”‡

I didn’t perceive their line delivery as sinister in the moment, but after I read the USA Today announcement, I heard the (probably unintentional) subtext. The business and legal side of the news industry would prefer not to tangle with the Big Bad that killed Gawker ten years ago.

This essay has been sitting in my gut for two weeks, and I haven’t seen any reporters write about the deal from the audience privacy perspective. I don’t want to be the Cassandra in the content mines. As a consultant, I’d rather build good systems than call out the bad ones, and I feel like a conspiracy theorist writing it out. But as a citizen whose perception of country and freedom keeps getting ripped into tinier and tinier pieces, and as an experienced professional who knows how “orchestrating personal data” works, I’m scared.

I am not a lawyer, but I advise companies to talk to their lawyers when they procure audience data-processing software or make changes to their privacy policy. From where I’m sitting, the best case scenario in the partnership is that Palantir helps USA Today develop a new iteration of the chum bucket.

In its current unregulated state, the risks of a massive news organization working with a politically motivated organization like Palantir are extremely high: Palantir could build its own interest graph from USA Today’s data, which could be used to provide information to law enforcement on zip codes that index high for interest in stories about protest actions. Stories about immigration regulation and the abuses of ICE could be removed or deprioritized from news websites if they are not generating enough revenue. Individuals who seek out those news stories could be identified. Palantir may develop political advertising products similar to Meta’s, like those described in Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People. Instead of laws, all that protects the audience are Palantir’s opaque corporate policies and the word of its co-founders that those protections won’t suddenly change on a whim.

Media businesses are struggling, but that doesn’t mean they have the right to compromise their audience’s privacy and, potentially, their safety and autonomy. The capacity for more than 100 million people to access the news privately and confidentially is now at the whim of a proudly military-aligned data processor that cares more about protecting corporate sovereignty than human freedom and individual autonomy.

Want to do something about it?

• If you’re a journalist, please cover this story in more depth. The above is all desk research combined with some professional knowledge.

• If you buy advertising, ask your vendors whether they work with partners who collaborate with Palantir. Simply asking is often enough to raise alarm.

• If you live in a community with a USA Today Co. paper, call them (subscription lines, not editorial) and ask them what’s up with your privacy as an audience member.

• Support the NewsGuild, who raised the alarm. (I am not a NewsGuild member, just a fan.)

• Spread the word. I don’t care whether you link me or not. Just stop doomscrolling and talk about it with your friends and colleagues. I fully believe in the power of speech to make real change.

• Understand what AI-integrated software can do now, and focus on what you can solve in the present tense. Look at quarterly earnings and ongoing deals in addition to data center plans. The most pressing concerns have nothing to do with the consumer layer of the internet: slop, branded merchandise, em dashes, fiction. There’s no money in that. There’s money in software. Businesses make bad tech decisions when they fear they’ll be left behind, and they’re making those deals now.

The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, an independent content strategy consultant.

Affiliate referrals: Ghost publishing system

If you’re interested in more like the essays below:

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Time Warp: 6 years of writing about AI, algorithms, and other software

In 2026 I’ve had more opportunities to practice Radical Acceptance than I’ve ever had before. I’ll spare you (for now) the laundry list of circumstances I never thought possible that I’ve tackled this year, but the world changed immensely, and I am at its mercy. I can’t say whether a massive shift in one’s worldview is typical to the human experience of middle aging, or if my permanent suspension of disbelief is a consequence of witnessing some of the worst moments in American history, but I will accept as possible any new bullshit thrown my way.

Amid the shakubuku, one of the easiest shifts I’ve accepted is that the technologies under the umbrella of Artificial Intelligence are not going away and are, thank goodness, kinda sorta delivering on what they initially promised. I’m able to make and talk with spreadsheets via Claude, and the tool completes the task without much trouble. Like nearly 50% of Americans who use AI several times a week, I’ve learned to chatbot, refined my prompts, and accepted that we aren’t stopping the giant AI boulder rolling down the hill. Sure, it’s a bubble and yes! there are all kinds of issues with LLMs. But now that the technology seems to be working fairly well, I accept that organizing and accessing information will be primarily natural language-based within the next five to twenty years.

A couple of months ago, I caught a classic story of Radical Acceptance: The Rocky Horror Show on Broadway. Thematically, Rocky Horror is about the acceptance of sexuality, perversion, and queerness, but it’s also literally a story about accepting your fate. Sometimes your car dunzos-out right near the Frankenstein Place, and you have no choice but to consort with the keepers of the castle, who happen to be a crew of aliens from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania.

One of those aliens, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, is a mad scientist on the verge of revealing his newest creation: a perfect life-form built from scratch. Frank-N-Furter shares many traits with the CEOs of top AI companies: he’s a total monomaniacal weirdo who believes in his own superiority, subjecting everyone in his path to his vision. His flunkies agree with everything he says, even when it seems a little off. His invention is his idea of a perfect man who can serve his needs: Rocky, a swole dumb guy who runs around in little shorts.

When the mad doctor seeks praise from his entourage for his invention, two of his three sidekicks praise his accomplishments as “pure genius” and “a triumph of your will.” The third sidekick, a sassy lass named Columbia, regards the new invention of Rocky and exclaims: “He’s okay!”

Columbia’s pronouncement is how I feel about using Claude: He’s okay! The bot doesn’t resemble what I would personally develop, were I the CEO of an AI company. After many sessions, its voice grates, its commentary is predictable, its pulsating sphincter logo is cringe-inducing, and its problem-solving methods are recursive and weirdly self-flagellating. When its output doesn’t hit the intended mark, it feels like the juice might not be worth the squeeze. I certainly wish it took fewer resources and less money to create, and I wish that it weren’t readily accessible to the worst people during the most tumultuous political period of my lifetime.

But it does help me complete a good deal of complex, programming-adjacent work, in a way that I have never experienced before. I accept it, radically. It’s okay. It’s not going away.

Zhuzhing up the website and organizing the archive

With Claude Code, I’ve launched a new design for The Content Technologist and tweaked the theme to my liking, even though I have precious little skill coding in CSS or Javascript. If you haven’t been to the website in a bit, take a look.

To test how the tool understands and sorts content—the kind of work I do regularly as an information architect and search expert—I asked it to sort through my entire six-year archive and identify The Content Technologist’s top 25 strongest essays. It didn’t do this particularly well at the start, since only five of its initial selections made the final cut. It initially favored the political and “crisis writing” over the technical explainers or meandering essays I prefer. But I was impressed by its ability to extract themes and meaning (or the predictive-text illusion of meaning) from my weirdest, most complex writing. The thing can read, if not perfectly. Kinda like a human.

So, The Content Technologist has been reorganized and rearchitected, as I reach the end of my sixth year newslettering. Although client work is my top priority (and why I have been absent), I am making a concerted effort to stop filling my notebook with unsent, overly complex screeds and return to regular publishing. A writing practice is therapeutic when it’s not outright painful, and it’s done wonders in helping me process the unprecedented events and complicated emotions that I’ve Radically Accepted since 2019.

In the meantime, here’s where I’ve been: 25 essays that represent the best of The Content Technologist. With the help of the machine, I’ve also created a knowledge graph–style visualization that links the top 25 essays in the archive identified by each entry’s most prominent themes. An experienced digital designer will find all kinds of problems with it, like that it does not work well in mobile. But it’s a neat desktop experience, and it only took three sessions to compile and debug.

I still don’t use Claude, or any bot, to construct the sentences or determine the structure in this newsletter. I don’t agree when it tells me any particular sentence is “doing the work” or is “load-bearing.” But I do find it helpful, as an expert in the language of search, to explore how it understands and recommends language.

More on my many thoughts around the new software ecosystem soon. In the meantime, dig the past. Radically accept the present. The thing is here, it’s okay, it is changing how we work, and we are in it for the long haul.

The top 25 essays in The Content Technologist*

To navigate these essays by theme, check out the visualization. These essays were chosen with the help of Claude, ordered by most fun to read, according to the bot.

Here’s the full list, in fun-to-read order, with full titles linked and publish dates:

1. How to own the butt rock conversation (2021-03-02)

2. Mass-produced iteration vs. collaborative auteurs: The Wahlburgers–First Cow continuum (2022-12-29)

3. Billy Joel mathletics: How query fan-out identifies and interprets our weird world of words (2025-09-12)

4. Disambiguation, sliding doors, hallucinations, and madeleines: How transformers process, clarify, and produce language (2025-08-25)

5. The facts of lore: What happens when the most reputable information on the internet is about fiction? (2025-01-10)

6. Can content personalization algorithms satisfy the multitudes of personal taste? (2021-09-05)

7. Should you trust AI to write your content? (2020-02-13)

8. On iteration: Why digital business folks and content producers don’t always see eye-to-eye (2023-04-13)

9. When it comes to content, is data science actually scientific? (2023-12-08)

10. What exactly is bounce rate?: Post-structuralism and content analytics (2022-08-03)

11. From engineered content to informed editorial: Blazing new trails in digital publishing (2024-02-19)

12. The downfalls of content performance KPIs (2020-08-13)

13. Acting is actually doing something: On craft and its role in content production (2024-04-17)

14. The tyranny of the landing page (2021-04-23)

15. AI-generated content and the end of creative hacks (2019-08-08)

16. How to choose the right keywords for your content, OR True tales of a newbie content manager (2022-11-10)

17. How search and content recommendation algorithms work (2019-11-21)

18. The problem with Authority in SEO (2019-11-28)

19. Cultivating ideas in content production: This one weird trick will separate the bots from the professionals (2024-03-08)

20. What is the Gestalt in programmatically engineered content? (2024-07-16)

21. The content intelligence conundrum: Why AI alone won’t fix your content problem (2020-09-03)

22. End the “blog”: Why are you hiding all your best content in a single feed? (2024-08-30)

23. “Content” isn’t the enemy: Keeping content creative, not generative (2023-10-06)

24. Making impressions a thing of the past: Grounding your content performance data in reality (2024-07-02)

25. The human cache never fully clears (2022-04-07)

Enjoy the archive. If these essays are new to you, I’d love to hear what you think.

And happy Pride! The easiest thing to radically accept is queer culture and a spectrum of sexuality, as far as I’m concerned.

—DC

This month, The Content Technologist is celebrating five years of weekly publication. Woohoo! If you're interested in hearing from us more often as we update our resources for content professionals, subscribe to the weekly mailing list.

In-person workshop with MIMA August 22

Organic content performance for word people: How to use content analytics for editorial decision-making

Presented with the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) in-person at Br8kthru Consulting in Minneapolis at 8AM

Get tickets: $65 for MIMA members / $95 for non-members

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Workshop description
Do you know how well your digital content has really performed this year? Organic digital content performance analytics—for your website, social media channels, email newsletters, and everything else—are widely misunderstood, misinterpreted, and dismissed as less valuable than paid advertising.

But organic content converts at far higher rates and for longer periods than digital paid media. And when audiences connect to authoritative content, they’re more likely to become brand advocates. Too often, brands and agencies leave money on the table by misattributing performance and not giving their organic content the credit and attention it deserves.

In this workshop, we’ll cover how to measure the true business performance of content. We’ll explore what content metrics mean, how to create workable benchmarks, and how to use what you’ve learned from content analytics to inform future planning.

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From the weekly newsletter

Which is more important for publishers: Maintaining a vice grip on our intellectual property or acceding its value to the open web?

Last month, B2B content farm Forbes called out AI startup Perplexity for "willful infringement" of copyright law, according to Axios. From most websites, we'd take it more seriously, but Forbes has never been the pinnacle of business journalism, functioning more as an aggregator of pay-to-play PR schemes.

But should we, as publishers, encourage summary companies like Perplexity to have access to our original content? Our feelings are mixed.

Read the full post.

How the history of advertising makes impressions the worst metric for measuring content success

The metric of "impressions" was designed to help media buyers value their purchases across newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and outdoor (billboard) media. Each publication, channel, or venue would measure approximately how many people could have seen each impression based on subscriber bases, distribution estimations, and Nielsen's emerging system of broadcast measurement.

That way, a brand could measure approximately how many people maybe saw the same campaign on a billboard, a tv commercial, and in a magazine, then compare relevant sales to the campaign and say, "I guess it worked!" or "I guess it didn't!"

Want better results from your digital content? Take better benchmarks, based in reality, instead of relying on the automated and imprecise nature of the impressions metric in this explainer.

Read the full post.

Against continuous optimization: Does engineered content make Gestalt thinking obsolete?

In media, if you want to distribute a 90%-there product, like a 90% movie, it would likely be considered a B-movie, not suitable for any wide release. But in tech, if a company releases software that's meeting customer needs 90% of the time, that appears to be acceptable in many cases, because tech companies believe they will later make up that extra 10%, usually by leaning too heavily on requests for new features instead of completing the half-done ones.

Gestalt does not appear to be a consideration in DevOps, the corporate tech methodology for continuous software builds that, in my opinion, degrades quality of life and product. Continuous optimization leaves one feeling always pressured to meet the next goalpost, leaving minimal time for reflection on the whole.

How can continuous optimization and programmatic digital content coexist with the holistic approach to other content industries?

Read the full post.

Revolutionize your approach to digital content strategy

Level up your methods for the generative AI era with four skill-based self-paced courses, with bespoke recommended toolkits and 1:1 support.

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The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.

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Virtual event next week

Tackling the knowledge graph: Structuring content for AI

On Wednesday, June 26 (U.S.) and Thursday, June 27 (Australia), I'll be speaking with We Are Content Strategy in Melbourne, Australia. Register below, and catch me at the following local times:

• 9:00AM Melbourne time on June 27

• 6:00PM North American Central time on June 26

• 4:00PM North American Pacific time on June 26

Course preview: SEO myths (and why building for how audiences first matters)

Our new course to help you conquer the algorithms, Your Content Is Your Marketing, will be released at the end of the month.

In lieu of a short, social media-ready commercial spot, here is the third lesson, published in full, with professional opinions loud and clear. If more of this is your thing, preorder the full course. Prices go up when it's released on June 30.

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Additional housekeeping

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• What's Good?: A forever portal to submit your favorite links.

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From the weekly newsletter

What's a good website engagement benchmark? How to add sophistication to your content measurement approach

"Content measurement, when executed with a dose of sophistication, provides the quantifiable insights needed to prove exactly how quality digital content is making a business impact."

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Two tools—one automated, one human—to guide content style across any organization

"Being somewhat stylish, overachieving, cynical, and pretentious, I wished I could edit the books for actual style, interrogate the prose, manipulate the syntax, massage the chapters, and collaborate with the author.

"Instead, I holed up in an attic office hastily remedying the errors of an author who managed to spell the word the word "tomato" about eight different ways in a single 30,000-word manuscript, and not once correctly. We only had about three days for each book-length copy edit; there was no way I was asking this author anything except whether she wanted to preserve her vernacular while remaining consistent throughout with the alternate spelling 'tomater.'

When I see how computers, calculators made of 0s and 1s, interpret style in writing, their results look a lot like the edits I made in that first copy editing job: enforcing a set of rules for consistency but not necessarily readability or nuanced style."

Read the full piece: Two tools—one automated, one human—to guide content style across any organization

Revolutionize your approach to content strategy

Level up your methods for the generative AI era with four skill-based self-paced courses, with bespoke recommended toolkits and 1:1 support. Limited preorder available! When Expansion Pack preorders are gone, they're gone.

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The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.

Affiliate referrals: Ghost publishing system | Bonsai contract/invoicing | The Sample newsletter exchange referral | Writer AI Writing Assistant

Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd | PI.FYI

It's been a while since we sent our social/recap newsletter, but we've finally cleared enough room in the workflow to restart this overview so we can save room in our weekly Thursday newsletters for our best content.

In brief, here's everything going on so far in 2024 from The Content Technologist:

• Our brand new Courses subdomain is up and running and will be the home for our library of content strategy courses for the foreseeable future. We're busy populating that library with content!

• New courses! We've launched our first in a series of new content strategy courses, together called The Content Strategy Expansion Pack.

• More than (key)Words: Audience research for brilliant business-building content - Available now! Discounted pricing available until June 15.

  • Your content is your marketing: Content-driven organic growth for brand-builders, publishers, newsletterers, and algorithm skeptics - Launching June 30 and available for discount preorder now

  • Measuring content performance: Content analytics to help you understand your audience - launching September 30

  • Impactful content strategy: Planning for future content with resources and data you have now - launching December 30

Limited preorders available: Get all four courses (and start More than (key)Words today!) for a deep discount here. Limited to the first 30 orders. Perks and benefits for these early adopters on their way.

• What's Good?: A forever portal to submit your favorite links: software you can't live without, articles that get your brain moving, websites that excite, your stuff, others' stuff, you name it. Share what's good on the internet. If we think our audience would like it, we'll share.

• Podcast appearances: I've been on a couple of 'casts this year. Check 'em out:

• What's In Your Knowledge Graph? I hosted this webinar on April 30. More coming soon! There's a little audio mixup in the recording, but start around here, and it gets good.

  • Content Strategy Insights with Larry Swanson

  • Mind Your Own Marketing Business with Joe Barsness from Fjorge

• And finally... highlights from the weekly newsletter

"Audiences unfamiliar with the nuances of the medium will not see the discrepancy between how the computer automates content and how a professional would construct a similar product. But I see the shorthand in the process, and I'm frustrated that I have to learn a new way of doing things and correct a machine's—or a CEO's—mistakes. The software company did not build with experienced users in mind."

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More from the newsletter:

"Digital-first companies believe they can hack their way around or disrupt the realities of human content production. Performance-oriented digital marketing and content companies will often hire senior editors with a background in journalism, only to find that the journalist’s honed skills in fact-checking and editorial quality control can be an impediment to productivity and, thus, revenue generation.

Read the full post: Acting is actually doing something: On craft and its role in content production

"The company doesn’t scope for the journalist’s actual skills. And the journalist will back away from learning about the business requirements because their professional education insisted that business and content were separate endeavors; or push back on audience research, suggesting that the audience’s needs were secondary to the production of quality information or news."

Read the full post: What is content administration?

"In the past decade or so of content marketing and web self-publishing, many businesses ignored the idea phase of content, focusing only on the immediate outcomes (traffic or revenue) and giving little thought to brand reputation. 

But when we publish content on behalf of a business — for any reason at all — we are always making an argument. We are always floating an idea for our audience to accept or reject. Otherwise, why are we speaking if we do not have something to say?"

Read the full post: Cultivating ideas in content production

"Content strategy defines why, how, where, and for whom a company creates content. It comprises the activities that connect business goals with audience (aka consumer, customer, user, or client) needs, defines content’s purpose in an organization, and specifies the conditions that make content successful."

Read the full post: Redefining content strategy

Upcoming events:

Our summer calendar is coming together. Here's what we have planned, with more details on their way next month:

• Virtual event - late June - Content Strategy Meetup Australia

• Minneapolis content analytics workshop with MIMA - August 15, 2024 - more info coming soon!

Revised media kit:

Advertise with us! We've revised our media kit for the remainder of 2024. Get your product in front of content strategy leaders at brands, agencies, vendors, and other organizations that publish content. Become one of our first toolkit sponsors.

Join the Content Strategy Expansion Pack

Level up your methods for the generative AI era with four skill-based self-paced courses, with bespoke recommended toolkits and 1:1 support.

Preorder the Expansion Pack today

The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.

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Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd | PI.FYI

Upcoming events

This month we launched our new virtual events series, and we want to give a huge thanks to those who attended our first salon on the state of social media. (In case you missed it, you can watch a playlist of highlights here.) We have several skill-building workshops and talk show-style salons coming up, so mark your calendars.

Workshop: How to scope and sell content projects

October 19, 2023 | 12:00-2:00 PM Eastern
Online only: $250 for members, $300 for non-members

This course is designed for independent creators, agency strategists, and brand-side leaders who are looking to sell more complex, comprehensive and lucrative content strategy projects in 2024.

Join the workshop

Salon: Practical AI for content professionals

Date change! November 3, 2023 | 12:00-1:30 PM Eastern
Online only: $10 for members, $60 for non-members

In this salon, we'll explore where we're at with AI, what the technology can and can't do (despite what you may have heard), and how content people can make the robots work for them. Plus, you'll have the opportunity to network with other attendees and get ideas for tools and technology to manage social media.

Get your $10 ticket

Salon: Never go out of style — A live salon about content sophistication

December 1, 2023 | 12:00-1:30 PM Eastern
Online only: $10

In the age of automation and replication, style sets your content apart and makes it more human. But what is style, exactly? Get ideas for how to cultivate and advocate for content style in your organization; identify tools and tips for keeping style on-brand; and help us define the different dimensions of digital style.

Join the salon

Workshop: Annual content performance reporting — How to plan change with content data

December 7, 2023 | 12:00-2:00 PM Eastern

More info coming soon!

Got something you want to advertise in this newsletter? Curious about sponsoring an upcoming event? To be one of The Content Technologist’s inaugural sponsors, reply to this email or fill out this form, and we’ll be in touch.

Recent essays

Here's a rundown of the essays we published this month:

Productization: The path to more profitable freelance work

by Tina Morgan

Agencies are starting to convert their services into products. Here's why — and how — freelancers can follow their lead.

A few years ago, when I was still working in business development, a mid-size agency hired me to develop and run their product suite.

At the time, my relationship to development work was strained. I was tired of the pressure to create scopes that were unrealistic and underpriced. Tired of the understandable resentment from staff who had to execute those plans. Tired of consternation from leaders when the projects weren’t profitable. And I was especially tired of how this cycle repeated without any tangible benefits.

But a productization model was an appealing prospect. It presented an opportunity to define clear ways of working, create a standard for profitability, and provide strong data to balance the emotional decision-making that happened during the proposal process.

Keep reading »

Consistency of vision and "good" content

by Deborah Carver

A reflection on the meaning of good content, as defined by Google — for better or worse.

Unlike social platforms that flip-flop between promoting branded content, clickbait news, user-generated posts, viral videos reduced to reels, and stories upon stories upon stories in their pursuit of “user engagement,” Google’s search engine has been remarkably consistent in its content ranking system.

That system and the ideas behind it were communicated far less transparently when I started working in search a decade ago, but they’ve always been there: Create content that sounds expert, structure a website well, connect related topics together, and make the website technically easy to use. When you optimize a website with Google's system in mind, you’ll create what most would consider a Good Website. No other big tech company has put forth a vision for good content that’s as comprehensive and consistent as Google. (The monopoly dollars, of course, make the consistency of vision possible.)

Keep reading »

Everything lives in the rectangle: Federated content & social media

by Sam Thielman

From Mondrian to federated content, we're on the cusp of reimagining social media so that it communicates what mass social networks left behind. 

For a long time, the social media game trended toward models that could be scaled to accommodate massive groups, designed not only to connect individuals but also to compete with television and newspapers. As a result, companies like Facebook have data centers all over the world where they host content for billions of users.

But everything on Facebook is hosted on Facebook's servers and communicates using Facebook's proprietary software; that's not federation. Instead, it's the problem that federated networks are trying to fix.

Most small websites — or small social networks — don't need mass, global scale. With federated social networks, smaller operators can ideally reach interested audiences globally without server farms or proprietary software. There are a few snags, however, and federation clearly isn't for everyone. 

Keep reading »

In case you missed it...

• How content excels with creative organizational design by Vicky Gu

• The power of brand voice at Bookshop.org by Lindsay Li

• Robots.txt vs. AI robots: How to block your web-based IP from crawlers by Deborah Carver

The Content Technologist: Content Pros Update is compiled by Deborah Carver, founder and publisher of The Content Technologist, and Digital Production Assistant M.E. Gray.

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Events

Introducing our brand new event series, with in-person and virtual skill-building workshops and our talk show-style salon.

Ghost subscribers to either the weekly or monthly newsletters get $50 off each event – and it's free to sign up.

In-person events

Beyond the campaign: A workshop about developing branded formats
Co-presented with Matt Locke of Storythings
September 26, 2023 | 1:00-4:00pm
The Farm Soho, NYC

Best for: Brands looking to find an improved framework for launching and developing content formats or series

About this event: Go in-depth on the research, strategy, and methodology behind developing branded formats that build audiences and create connection.

Get tickets

Virtual events

Relationship status update: A salon about... whatever social media is today
September 8, 2023 | 12:00-1:30PM Eastern
Online only: $10 for members, $60 for general public

Best for: Anyone looking for a smart, quirky break on the first Friday after summer ends

About this event: Is social media over? Or is it better than it's ever been? We'll talk with our experts about how social networks are functioning in the 2020s, how you should navigate your professional and brand social media strategies, and what social networks will look like in ten years.

Get your ticket

How to scope and sell content projects
September 22, 2023 | 12:00-2:00PM Eastern
Online only: $250 for members, $300 for general public

Best for: Independent contractors and agencies looking to sell more content strategy and creation projects

About this event: Looking to sell more complex, comprehensive and lucrative content strategy projects next year? This workshop on content project scope and administration will help you level up your proposal and pitch game.

Get tickets

Mark your calendars

Salon: Practical AI for content professionals
October 6, 2023 | 12:00-1:30PM Eastern
More details soon!

Skill workshop: How to get the most out of Ghost
October 19, 2023 | 6:00-8:00PM Eastern
More details soon!

Want your ad to appear in this newsletter? Interested in sponsoring upcoming events? To be one of The Content Technologist’s inaugural sponsors, reply to this email or fill out this form, and we’ll be in touch shortly.

The power of brand voice at Bookshop.org

by Lindsay Li

With literary community at its core, Bookshop helps indie booksellers thrive in a world where small businesses’ odds of success are bleak. It supports authors and reviewers who want to grow their audience, and small press publishers who want their books distributed across the world. Most importantly, it provides consumers with a means to purchase a wide array of books in varying formats (paperback, hardcover, digital disk, etc.) from local bookstores — not in spite of them. 

Translating these values into a voice that conveys their authenticity isn’t simple, especially because approachability is crucial to Bookshop’s brand. In addition to being a marketplace with plural functions and audiences, it’s also a community hub where everyone from the extremely bookish to one-time gift shoppers must feel welcome. But Bookshop pulls it off, and the brand approach the company uses to win over its patrons are worth our consideration.

Read the full article

How we're approaching social media in an age of fragmentation

by Deborah Carver and Wyatt Coday

From our view, the resulting resistance toward social isn’t going anywhere. Even for content professionals who have developed social media savvy, major adjustments are on the horizon. That challenge may seem daunting on the surface, but it also means fresh data about user preferences will become available. With that new data, content teams can sunset social strategies that suck up resources without producing results and free themselves of pointless work.

Whether we like it or not, social platforms hold an integral role in the who, what, when, where, why, and how of content development and distribution. Oddly, it’s this damned-if-I-do, damned-if-I-don’t dilemma that has us at The Content Technologist excited for the opportunity to test ideas, mess up, fail, and maybe even accrue some loyal fans along the way. We're slowly rolling out to more social channels, and we wanted to let you in on our planning.

Read the full article

Intellectual property as performance content: Why the MetaCurse has imprisoned Spider-Man

by Wyatt Coday

Sometimes IP-related gains aren't obvious. IP-driven films do fail financially, but the massive audiences they reach give entertainment studios data they transform into serviceable market research. That market research ensures future rounds of blockbusters and that studios are activating the right stories for the current social climate. 

In other words, these films are what marketers call "performance content." With audiences as their guinea pigs, failure is preemptively integrated into their distribution strategy, so even flops produce meaningful data. 

More than sales, what makes movie franchises cash cows are their in-built audiences — and the value of fan loyalty cannot be underestimated. For many viewers, these modified movies, television shows, comics, and books retell the stories from their childhood and offer a conversation piece between parents and their children. For others, they are easter egg–packed stories with familiar plot points that fans already enjoy, but with a different focal point, angle, timeline, or outcome. For those outside the primary fan-base, they are fodder for small talk because everyone else is obsessing about them. 

Media products ultimately sell feelings — think "look and feel." To a fan, knowing that a piece of media will inspire feelings makes it even more irresistible. With retellings, even when they adapt stories that have dark or challenging arcs, warm, fuzzy, and sentimental feelings are nearly guaranteed.

Read the full article

More from our archives

The Content Technologist: Content Pros Update is compiled by Deborah Carver, founder and publisher of The Content Technologist. 

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This month in The Content Technologist

Here's a rundown of the essays we published for paid members in the past few weeks:

On iteration: Why digital business folks and content producers don’t always see eye-to-eye

by Deborah Carver

The goal of iteration, on the other hand, is to work from a minimum viable creative idea and test what will grow toward the intended result. While the goal of iterative design is to know half-baked ideas have potential — fast — the outcome in the real world is a sea of unfinished products and roughly hewn promotional content, much like the internet itself.

The iteration business exists in sharp contrast to traditional print media and video production; in industries more aligned with manufacturing than software engineering, iteration is difficult and not particularly profitable. Whether printing newspapers, records or books, tiny changes to content mean type must be reset, plates and colors re-calibrated. Once the book or magazine ships, its physical being is out there in the world, not to be changed until the next printing.

Video production is an even bigger mess when iterative methods are introduced. Anyone who's been on a video set knows that seemingly minor changes to staging can mean extra hours of work for the lighting crew. “We’ll fix it in post” causes eye rolls from veterans who see clearly how the whole thing could have been planned better. Sure, Hollywood can make changes during production, but that could mean hours or days of union time wasted and money burned… all because someone wanted to change a line.

Twentieth century manufacturing-driven cultural industries also value originality and exclusivity, whether that means publishing a juicy scoop in the evening news or releasing the only girl toy–themed summer blockbuster. Getting it right on the first try often means a more profitable product.

The people who think, “We should do the exact same thing as last time but with one minor tweak to better affect market performance” tend to underestimate the expense and intention of creative work. They don’t see that iterations can have a butterfly effect, that “just one small change” early on can affect an audience’s comprehension of a message or have some cascading ripple effect that causes errors down the line.

Read the full article

AI tools for professional writers: How to prompt, what to build, and what to avoid

by Natasha Serafimovska

Originality in language and ideation can help both search engines and human audiences categorize content as high quality. You don’t want AI to rehash the same ideas hundreds of other websites have already published on the topic.

When I asked the AI for tips on improving sales, its suggested topics were pretty mainstream. If I run the same prompt a few times, I can spot patterns and identify repeating topics. Using human expertise, I can deduce what’s missing from the list that could be a unique take.

Key takeaways:

1. Assume AI will generate the most mainstream ideas, then eliminate those from your writing.

2. Probe the tool for more unconventional suggestions.

3. Play with inputting tone of voice or industry knowledge to generate unusual answers.

   Read the full article

How to mine good insights from negative feedback for content strategy

by David Gonzalez-Cameron

Want to know what buyers think of your products? The first place to look is in your product reviews. Not company reviews, which encompass your entire brand, but product reviews on individual SKUs (if you have them).

Tools like Yotpo and Google reviews enable ecommerce marketers to embed reviews on product description pages. Normally on a scale of 1–5, shoppers can leave feedback on their experiences.

Maybe it was a 5-star review and the experience was great. Or maybe it's a 1-star review and the person hated that product. Both reviews are useful.

Product reviews don't just apply to physical goods. They also apply to businesses that sell services, experiences, or paid content.

For example, a ski resort in Utah turned negative reviews into a positive ad campaign, owning their challenge and targeting a more advanced audience. Your niche product or content could do the same: Maybe your content isn't for beginners, and it's aimed at seasoned professionals. Lean into that. Focus your content on the intermediate and advanced practitioners.

Read the full article

Are you hitting the mark? Analyzing social media data for content success

by Emily Rochotte

A routine social media checkup identifies how your content is progressing. Ideally you’ll be checking weekly or at least every other week, but the prescription for health is never one-size fits all. For example, if you only post once a week, monthly would be best.

Checking too frequently may get you hung up on minutiae. Checking your analytics after each post is like Googling your symptoms when you feel a cold coming on. If you hyperfixate on one small symptom, you might think you’re sick with a deadly disease… when all you have is a headache.

Don’t let daily performance overwhelm you. Much like weighing yourself, results can fluctuate day-to-day. Most content businesses are more concerned with how long-term performance relates to business goals. Focusing on the analytics insights of today’s Reels won’t make or break social media results, but taking stock of Reels analytics month-over-month is a valuable snapshot of how your content affects your audience and your business.

Read the full article

Parrots are not stochastic and neither are you

by Arikia Millikan

I’ll be the first to admit that I am incredibly biased — toward parrots. I’ve always liked them and felt a connection to them ever since I saw them in my backyard as a toddler.

It’s disappointing that humans, as a species, spend so much energy and money hunting for intelligent life in outer space when we have a remarkable form of non-human life right here: a creature so intelligent it can use our own languages to communicate with us. All that effort put into interspecies communication, and the best we can manage to treat parrots is to capture and subjugate them.

Meanwhile, we destroy their habitats to clear the land that hosts the server farms, which in turn power the “intelligent” LLMs that ethics researchers attempt to denigrate when they call them “parrots.” It’s a good thing parrots can only speak human and not read it, lest they fully comprehend the tragic irony of their circumstances.

And yes, parrots do comprehend, like humans. They understand options and make choices based on that comprehension. Sometimes they change their minds mid-action. While the stochastic output of an LLM can seem like an entity deciding or exercising creative thought patterns, it’s just an algorithm running on a computer.

Read the full article

Paid content from the archives

Algorithms as interpreted by TV writers

by Deborah Carver

"The algorithm felt it wasn't hitting the right taste clusters," the network exec says.

Sally, stymied, argues that her Rotten Tomatoes metric proves it's worth everyone's time, that it barely had a chance to reach its core audience. After all, the network invested time and money into Sally's project. But in this case, the critical aggregator metric (Rotten Tomatoes) doesn't stand a chance against the predicted return on investment (the streaming network's proprietary black box of data).

The audience identifies with Sally's indignation at the algorithm's swift dismissal of her art. It's a familiar feeling for writers and creators, the algorithm that deems content unworthy of pursuing. I love the executive's language in her dismissal: "The algorithm felt," reflecting both how executives occasionally speak and the godlike deterministic power businesses can give to algorithms.

But Sally's attachment to her own KPI, also a black box of dubious merit, is equally unfortunate. I know Rotten Tomatoes holds some clout in the entertainment industry for measuring critical praise, but it's every bit as problematic and arbitrary as every other ranking algorithm. It's just a single point in the plot, and it's never the whole story.

The writing team on Barry most likely doesn't really understand algorithmic decision-making or the value of good stories, and they don't have to. But they're counting on the fact that the audience perceives algorithms as arbitrary and ruthlessly deterministic. In legacy creative industries, algorithms are the anti-art, the angry god, the unflinching paper-pusher.

Read the full article

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https://www.content-technologist.com

Thanks for visiting! This Substack will be retired at some point, but it’s not on my priorities list for a bit.

• The exciting new future of The Content Technologist

• How I learned that Ghost was better for SEO than Substack

• A review of TextSniper

• Content tech links of the week, none of which are election-related

The next phase of The Content Technologist

I genuinely love writing this newsletter every week. I’d like to be able to generate income from it directly, instead of just through consulting gigs.

In the past 17 months, I’ve defined the mission of The Content Technologist more clearly, and I want to be able to clearly communicate that for readers. That mission:

1. To demystify how both computers and people process digital content, whether via algorithm or editorial curation

2. To empower content creators to navigate digital production and distribution skillfully and ethically

I’m excited to announce the next iteration of The Content Technologist: a membership-driven resource hub with education at its core. The new content-technologist.com will comprise:

• The weekly newsletter, same as it ever was, featuring an essay, a review and links

• A fully featured website with easily accessible guides for popular topics like SEO and UX

• Video courses on popular topics, starting with foundational SEO and Google Analytics 4

• Monthly interactive events

A few more features are percolating, but I’m going to start with the above and expand when it feels organic.

In December I’ll launch a redesigned and expanded Content Technologist website with membership features, including paid and free memberships.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you received this email, you’re a Founding Member.

Founding members of The Content Technologist

As promised, The Content Technologist is free forever for the first 1,000 members. The first 1k email addresses in my database will be considered Founding Members and will have free access to the full Content Technologist archive, including all reviews, essays and guides. Founding Members will also receive a discount on courses and events.

You’ll continue to receive this newsletter — but after this issue it will be powered by Ghost rather than Substack. I’ll be migrating your data and eventually purging my subscriber list from Substack.

I’m also taking a break from writing new essays and reviews in November as I prepare the new content and migrate all the old content over to content-technologist.com. I may send one or two quick issues, but they will likely be clip shows and promotions.

Founding memberships will remain open until I hit 1k — but I warn you, I’m close, so if you have colleagues who would benefit from an ongoing membership resource for SEO, UX and digital publishing, then encourage them to sign up today.

Subscribe now

And now for the juiciest bit of this email:

Why I’m switching to Ghost

The short answer is that Ghost is better for the SEO and UX I champion.

I’ve hinged The Content Technologist — not just the newsletter but the whole consulting business it supports — on the idea that the needs of a business should define software and channel choices, and not the other way around. Substack no longer meets the needs of what my business has become.

Full transparency: All links to Ghost in this newsletter — and from here on out — include my affiliate referral code. For The Content Technologist, I do not receive affiliate income from software referral programs unless I am an active and committed user of the software and the referral income can lessen my operating costs. If you read this, click on my link, and happen to join Ghost afterward, I’ll receive a percentage of your subscription for as long as it’s active. You won’t pay more when you use my link. I absolutely never receive referral income from weekly reviews.

So if you read this and decide Ghost is for you, please click on the link here. It won’t cost you anything, but it will help me run my business and create more great content.

Why Substack was a great first host of my newsletter

When I first chose Substack, I was drawn to:

• The svelte authorship experience

• The small but growing community of talented writers

• The option to host either free or paid content

• Email newsletter production automation — because sending an email newsletter from scratch is extremely labor intensive

• Legitimacy from using a platform that other writers I liked were using.

The content format was more or less predefined, but Substack sacrificed features for functionality, and the tech worked reliably. Your audience knew you weren’t going to spam them with endless automated sales pitches. Early subscribers knew that it was not just a mailing list. It was a Substack, the cure for the common newsletter.

Writers I liked were on Substack. I remain a massive fan of The Margins, Normcore Tech, The Main Event, Deez Links, BIG, and Things That Have Caught My Attention. I also found Office Hours, Medialyte, Branded, and some other less professional newsletters on the platform. It’s a good platform, especially if you only want to write a weekly newsletter and don’t want to manage a website.

From the beginning, though, I knew that Substack’s setup wasn’t archive- or SEO-friendly. Substack publishes all its newsletters on the web, but they’re uncategorized besides reverse chronological order and most popular. Individual posts are nearly impossible to find after you’ve sent about ten newsletters, unless they’re extremely well-organized like Agents and Books. Really, only if you’re Agents and Books.

Building a web archive on Ghost

Since a core part of The Content Technologist newsletter is to educate and inform, a usable archive is imperative. Searchable archives are necessary in an accumulative content approach. In this newsletter, I define concepts that build week after week, or that hop around to a variety of topics, and it can be hard to follow for new subscribers. All subscribers need to be able to access both old and new content.

A year ago I built a website on Ghost to be the well-organized archive of The Content Technologist newsletter. It was an experiment in learning a promising new CMS and an exercise in one of my all-time favorite activities: designing a website from scratch.

With the Ghost CMS, I could present a clear information architecture and split out my newsletter sections into individual articles. I optimized articles on content-technologist.com for search instead of email — separating reviews from essays, trimming the bits that were of the moment, adding more descriptive article titles and tags so they’re fairly easy to find.

The period of duplicate content: Posting on both Substack and Ghost

For a few months I published my content twice, once on Substack for the newsletter and once on Ghost for the archive. If you know anything about SEO or content distribution at all, you’ll know that duplicate web content is a big no-no. A search engine doesn’t know what the true source of authority is, and duplicate content can be perceived as a cheat. But I was confident in my ability to canonicalize my pages and manage both systems, at least for a little while.

When the pandemic hit, maintaining two separate content hubs became unsustainable. I abandoned Ghost for the most part; the Substack newsletter was enough to manage.

But the well-organized archive did its job: it gathered organic traffic.

Finding the accidental benefits of an SEO-friendly web archive: Ghost pulls ahead for the win

Let’s start with a data story: a comparison of my organic search traffic on Ghost from April-October 2020 versus my organic traffic on Substack.

Putting the extremely small scale of this traffic trend aside (350 visitors a month is barely needle-moving), the comparative trend is a clear win for Ghost.

Even with ever-expanding new content, Substack attracts minimal organic search traffic each month. Ghost on the other hand is indexed quickly and found easily through search— and I’ve updated my content exactly twice since February.

I expected search engines to pick up the software reviews from my Ghost site. After all, they were buried under an essay in the Substack format. Search engines — heck, all computers along with library visitors — don’t really like content with different subjects stacked with no real metadata or definition.

More surprising: Search engines picked up and indexed the Ghost version of the exact same essays that ran on Substack. Even when I’d published the essay on Substack months earlier.

Sometime around April my Ghost site started to rank well for an essay about Netflix KPIs I’d posted on both platforms in January. Google loved my succinct prose enough to algorithmically passage out its own meta description. Evidently readers liked the essay when they clicked through because it’s still ranking toward the top for a variety of queries like “Netflix KPI.”

SEO nerds: I’m pretty sure Google’s passaging approach is going to play out similarly to the content above. That’s absolutely not the meta description I entered.

This single post, buried in my archive, is the number one driver of traffic to The Content Technologist. It’s the only post I’ve ever written about Netflix and one of maybe three I’ve published about entertainment content. It’s an anomaly as far as my content goes — I focus on web content versus entertainment brands — but the small success is proof that well-written content from a relatively unknown brand can be picked up by Google, even in a saturated search market, even in 2020.

Although the Netflix KPI post is only tangential to one of my core content pillars, I know I can optimize it. You bet I’m reupholstering that post with some links, a more attractive call to action, and a membership sign-up on the same domain. I’m going to design a collection around all the analytics content, sprinkling in context and drawing connections between different posts. I’ll add a few more collections for other pillars, prep some new content, make a sustainable schedule for content maintenance…

If I’m getting organic search traffic on a one-off post living on a barely updated site that’s minimally optimized, imagine what can happen when I actually try.

I like you, Substack, but you haven’t provided much in the way of organic growth — either in search engines or through your platform. So I’ve chosen Ghost.

For the digital strategy nerds: a reminder that organic acquisition is always easier

One of the easiest ways to build a sustainable independent media business is to succeed in organic search. If you’re halfway cognizant of writing to meet audience needs and know how to optimize for readers, SEO traffic is a boon for new subscribers.

Legacy media brands don’t often know how to use SEO properly, which is why so many online writers wind up with a bad relationship with the entire idea of optimization. But trust me: organic search is the best connector to the people who want to read what you write.

I encourage my clients to focus on organic (inbound) content rather than advertising (outbound) all the time. Passive traffic income is so much easier than the repetitive churn of asking for subscribers through fleeting ads or social platforms. Frankly, I’m tired of being sold to and I’m tired of selling in 2020. Organic traffic removes that pressure to sell. I’d rather spend my time building relationships.

Organic search is a better fit for the audience I’m building: content strategists, web professionals, tech-savvy writers and marketers who want to make content better and are actively looking for solutions. On a newsletter-only platform like Substack, my content may not be useful to an audience right away, since I get deep into specifics and nitty gritty tactics that most content strategists use maybe once or twice a year.

When my audience needs to pick up what I’m putting down, I want them to find a good resource. Ideally that resource would attract audiences from both referrals and search engines.

What I like about Ghost

I’ve also enjoyed the experience of working with Ghost over the past year. It’s a content management system that centers all the parts I love about making websites. I choose to purchase the managed services through Ghost(Pro), although you can always install the Ghost CMS on your own service provider and handle the back-end yourself. The out-of-the-box free Ghost CMS has great features, which include:

• Focus on the writing experience with the option to add code when needed

• Free and paid membership built into the CMS

• A healthy selection of themes that I can customize with my limited coding knowledge

• A flexible tagging system

• Integrations with other common website software like Typeform and my preferred writing software Ulysses

The paid version of Ghost(Pro) additionally:

• Handles the back-end architecture — site speed, security and functionality are all covered with my monthly membership

• Lets me use my custom domain through my normal web services provider (MediaTemple, which hosts all the domains I buy but never use)

• Personalized, supportive customer service that has been just lovely. (Substack’s service, for its user base, is totally fine and I have no complaints. I know I’m paying for service here)

As with all content management systems, Ghost has its quirks. My quick success with Ghost is extremely dependent on the fact that I’m a content strategist — I know how to manage tags, information architecture, and metadata. I know the many ways one can fuck up a website and I’m careful to avoid them.

I’m well aware that I pay for Ghost(Pro) and I’ve been using Substack for free. But the fixed fees for Ghost are far easier for me to swallow when I know I’m getting site speed, security, and most importantly, discoverability in return.

Talkin shit about a pretty Substack…

Meanwhile, Substack still has that lovely writing experience, but growing organic subscriptions for my free content should be easier on the platform itself. Other than one or two more referrals from potentially being featured on the site, I don’t see how my subscriber acquisition strategy would change if I launched a paid subscription program there.

When the recent oversaturation of writers hopping on the newsletter bandwagon meets Substack’s near void of structured data, it’s extremely difficult to discover other newsletters. Did you know that new Substacks are so hard to find, there is now a Substack newsletter specifically devoted recommending other Substack newsletters?

I had hoped Substack would build out its recommendation and discovery modules in the past year, but it hasn’t. Give us some way finding guidelines, some categorization and metadata. We need some Geocities addresses, y’all.

It’s not just that the Substack platform doesn’t optimize for sustainable independent growth; it’s also their business strategy of scaling on bylines and short-term takes rather than in-depth content and community.

In the past few months, Substack has prioritized poaching known bylines, and that whole approach gives me the heebie-jeebies. The winners in Known Media Name culture hyperbolize to the point of malice and draw from all the worst tendencies of tv news and hustle culture combined. I’ve spent my career avoiding the status quo-hards who enjoy mediocre bloviating like Matt Taibbi and Andrew Sullivan, and I don’t want to be on the same platform competing for subscription dollars and customer service with those bedbugs. The nail in the coffin came after Betsy Reed’s scathing assessment of Glenn Greenwald’s next move.** The whole platform is on the verge of becoming Large Adult Twitter, as Ben Smith pointed out this week. It’s not really an audience-focused media model if the same people from 15 years ago are building their fortunes on attention and eyeballs.

Clearly I can talk some shit, but I don’t want to be lumped in with a platform that’s synonymous with gossip. All that negativity gets me down, man.

I’ll leave those gripes right here, but I want to support companies whose business strategy I can get behind and who are passionate about the new possibilities and the future of content. Ghost’s CMS is specifically designed for independent publishers like me. I’d prefer to build my own brand and continue writing about nerdy technical topics while developing my voice as a writer.

In the end it’s a business decision

It is far easier to attract subscribers on Ghost. I can make more money on Ghost than I can on Substack, and I get to manage a website, which is one of my favorite things in the whole world.

And look — you might be one of those people who hates Google and doesn’t want to rely on Google SEO for their business. But Google’s organic search POV has always been to help better content appear in search results. They’ve consistently updated their discovery algorithms for the better and are far less capricious and more transparent than the social networks when it comes to updates. (More on my complicated but mostly positive feelings about Google.)

People searching for content marketing, SEO and UX information use web search. I’m going to use the superpowered free discovery services that Google and Bing provide.

You might want to switch your Substack, Patreon or other gated subscription content to Ghost if:

• Your content is accumulative: you cover complex topics that often refer to each other and sometimes require deeper context

• You want to preserve your content in a searchable archive with a clear information architecture

• You want to have more control over how your content is presented and maintained

• You’re somewhat tech savvy, or you were once

• You want move beyond building a portfolio and develop a media brand

• You like websites and don’t mind managing one

• You don’t want to manage plugins or web security for a full self-build site on Wordpress or another platform

• You want to rely exclusively on subscriber or native advertising revenue, rather than banner ads (you might be able to put these on ghost but why?)

• You don’t mind working with a growing platform with good but fairly limited features

• You have some basic basic knowledge of HTML and CSS — or you don’t mind paying someone to help you learn how to add and tweak your preferences

As I’m transitioning fully to Ghost, I’ll be documenting my full process and creating a guide for anyone who wants to do the same.

It’s been a good run, but I’m stopping to catch my breath and change my route a little. Here’s hoping you’ll join me for the next phase.

Until I fully transition to Ghost, you can subscribe here. I will port the new data over by the end of the month and keep you on the mailing list.

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I don’t know when, but this tool will come in handy: Text Sniper review

In New York during the early 2000s, available jobs for a college student with an in-progress English degree were:

1. Unpaid internships for publishing and media companies

2. Low-paying internships for publishing and media companies

3. Content digitization

I couldn’t afford to take unpaid internships, and the low-paying internships were great, but they always had a time limit of a summer or a semester or whatnot. The most reliable work — and by far the most lucrative — was found in digitization.

From sophomore to senior year, I metamorphosed physical media archives into digital form at several organizations, cleaning up and clarifying and adding metadata with literally no training whatsoever. But I learned the fine art of scanning books with OCR — or optical character recognition.

When it worked properly, OCR turned books into searchable documents. At the time, I spent my work hours scanning book pages, correcting lowercase o’s to a’s and vice-versa, but if I could get paid and didn’t have to talk to coworkers through my hangover, I was happy. If there are any archivists in this crowd, I’m sure you’re far more familiar with OCR tech and its capablities.

When I read about Text Sniper in this week’s Dense Discovery, I thought: OCR… I haven’t heard that name in years!

Text Sniper uses OCR to pull text out of images. That’s it. I don’t actually have that much to say about it, so you received an autobio of an introduction.

Text Sniper at a glance

When I tested Text Sniper on the graphic above, the tool pulled all the text perfectly from the above graphic — even from the weirdo font, even from the light grey on white.

You can also use Text Sniper to capture text in an image, then convert from text to speech.

Text Sniper is only for Mac OS. You may need it to scan old PDFs for web content or when a client sends an image with information embedded instead of text conent.

It’s a neat little tool, the kind you never know when you’ll need, and it’s $7US. So glad to see OCR is alive and well.

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Content tech links of the week

Election-free because I don’t have much to say about it beyond swear words.

• Last week I mentioned that our alt-weekly, City Pages, had published its last issue. Music editor Keith Harris wrote a fantastic elegy for CP’s music journalism legacy in the Times.

• Writer published a disheartening but enlightening survey about microaggressions, bullying and communication trends in the work from home era. We need to do better, friends.

• Always into a super blunt headline, this one from Nieman Lab: “Two new studies show, again, that Facebook doesn’t censor conservatives”

Catch you on the flip side on the new platform. If you’ve read this far, I’d love to know what you’d like to see as I shift to a new direction.

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The U.S. elections are less than a week away, and I’m deep into anxiety mode, so forgive the cranky tone and slippery metaphors.

More excitement — and big news — coming next week, regardless of election results. In the meantime, this week:

• Big, scary bad stats that can be really difficult to overcome

• A review of screen recording software Loom

• Content tech links of the week

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When big statistics lead to scary conclusions

Last week I was in a meeting where someone argued the following point as a case for maintaining high levels of personalization in ad tech: “70% of Hulu subscribers do not opt out of ads even though they option is available to them, and studies say 63% of people prefer targeted advertising.”

When I hear stats like these, which are usually repeated out of context with no sourcing, methodology, or dates, I freeze up. They’re often a red flag that nuance and design intentionality are going to go out the window in favor of “majority rule.”

Big stats are nothing new to marketing and business, and I’ve been known to throw around a few myself (although usually I’m also shouting “That’s what Pew says!” along with the data point). Statistics and data are fantastic to support an argument when they’re applicable to the conversation at hand.

Most of the time, however, the big stats are hot air. I’ve written before about the dangers of data we don’t understand, including:

• how data early on in the pandemic was extremely unreliable and often misused

• how our reliance on demographic data can contribute to racism and digital red-lining

• how the idea of content KPIs without context is misplaced

In the United States, until this year, most of the data we regularly consume is related to our deeply flawed and fragile electoral system. Our grade school-level training in democracy and leads us to think that if we have a data point that proves more than 50% of people prefer X over Y, or there’s a plurality among three choices, we’ve won the election. There are no other choices; the winningest preference decides, no matter the externalities.

Building products and content for people is not a winner-take-all mandate. A democratic election isn’t even a mandate to ignore dissenting preferences, regardless of politicians and horse-race news coverage and all the rest. Unfortunately, our professional conversations in the age of data excess and growth hacking don’t often reflect our ability to understand complex narratives.

Data should never shut down reasonable dissent

Many of us hold dear the principles of accessibility, in which products are designed for as many people as possible, regardless of ability, circumstance or internet speed. In my interpretation, accessibility also extends to comfort and consent: if a significant number of people express concern about a major change or circumstance, especially one they can’t reasonably opt out of or control, keeping technology and media accessible and functional means listening to and incorporating those concerns into the larger conversation.

In the age of networked knowledge, the 20th century media strategy of “controlling the conversation” is used more as steamrolling the conversation. Statistics and data are used to shut down diverse opinions and preferences, rather than an opportunity to discuss how and why those preferences or reservations were formed.

If in a survey, say, 70% of people say they don’t mind digital advertising (which I can’t find support for anywhere, but I’m just using it as a Random Tech Example Stat), what are we saying about the 30% of people who do mind? Are their opinions valid?

If a plurality 44% of people say in an opinion poll that we should not reduce the size of our police force, then surely that makes the whole city’s opinions official. No matter that 40% said police should be reduced and 16% are not sure — no further discussion, the biggest number wins and the concept of police abolition won’t be discussed any further in the local newspaper. (The Minneapolis StarTribune did a great job of reporting the actual protests, but their treatment of police abolition that really sticks in my craw, especially this poll and its subsequent use as “proof” of anything besides a multitude of opinions.)

We use stats in communication as a winner-takes-all, even though they’re just a sampled probability. During the pivot-to-video years, video vendor teams kept throwing out the stat, “80% of all content consumed online is video” as justification for a video investment.

In some meetings, I countered that statistic with statements like, “While I’m a believer in a mix of content that includes video, that number is misleading. That statistic is that high because you’re counting streaming services like Netflix, where people binge-watch for hours at a time, in with the content they consume on social media and web.”

Cue the dagger looks.

Preemptively creating better conversations around data and statistics

I don’t have overt solutions for these big bads, these giant statistical vampires that suck all choice and nuance out of a situation. To be frank, I probably counter these statistics tactlessly at least 50% of the time. I’m either silent and muttering, or I’m loud and belittling. People don’t really like when you’re kneecapping their core argument for existence, and I haven’t found the right way to address it either.

But when we have the opportunity to use statistics in a presentation, maybe we can provide a little more context. Let’s not use individual statistics as a mic drop.

We can provide our own explanation as to why we trust that data, and even more information about how we interpret what it means. Some solid explanations might be:

• The data is our own and represents the nuanced opinions of our readers, all of whose points of view are valid.
  

  Example: Even though 44% of people said they want more food and drink content, we should also pay attention to the 15% that said they wanted more comics content.

• The data comes from a reputable source, like Pew, the census, an established polling institution, or a research university with a large data set (aka not just the marketing “studies” grad students run with college sophomores as test subjects that prove nothing except the fact that sophomores at state universities are, well, sophomoric.)

• The methodology by which the data was collected is sound, and a brief explanation of why those methods were used.
  
  Example: Mention the number of respondents in the survey (n) or explain the study’s statistical significance.

• The data represents a legitimate gap — or a bigger world — that should be acknowledged.

  Example: Did you know that 46% of the world’s population are not internet users, per the International Telecommunication Union (aka the UN). That doesn’t mean that because 53% of global citizens are internet users, we should assume everyone has access to or even wants to be on the internet.

• The data is very recent and represents a change in opinion — even (especially) if it’s a smallish percentage that indicates a rising trend.

  Example: a July 2020 Gallup poll found that 15% of Americans in 2020 support police abolition, but compared to the number that would have supported it in 2019 or the fact that pollsters are even asking about it to begin with… well, that’s something we should acknowledge.

• The data represents a very limited of number of people using a feature or accessing certain content, unless that content serves a core need (like a specific form or a level of transparency like a privacy policy).
  
  Example: Carl and Jim are the only ones who use the comments widget, which contains some unknown opaque tracking that may compromise privacy, so maybe we should get rid of the comments widget until we can assure the safety of all our users.

• Multiple high-quality data points build to a conclusion, rather than just one or two statistics from assorted surveys.
  
  Example: If, just over one year ago, considering everything above, 73% of Americans believe that our political parties don’t agree on “basic facts” (Pew again), why are we using big stats to make our points to begin with?

Recognizing and addressing a diverse outlook — racially, culturally, and honestly we contain multitudes— means that we have to encounter and account for other points of view that may not easily fold into giant survey numbers or easy data points.

The only data that represents an election is actual election data. Otherwise, most big statistics have very little to do with actual people and shouldn’t drive blanket decision-making.

Data is be the starting point of a conversation and a guideline for benchmarking progress. It’s one of many weapons for change in our arsenal.

Encouraging more conversations, nuance, complexity about the data we see in marketing presentations, in product development, in news stories and everywhere will pay off in the long run. That’s my little hope anyway.

As a closer, here’s David Bowie presciently discussing the internet in 1999:

Just show me what you did real quick: Loom review

Do I miss when people look over my shoulder so I can demonstrate software? Not really, but in the pandemic era, I don’t have to worry about it anyway. However, instructive screen recordings have long been a bit of a pain, not necessarily to produce but to upload and send to your target audience.

Despite the rhyme, Loom has no connection with Zoom except that it’s a freemium self-service video platform that has recently risen in popularity. But Loom is quickly becoming a standard, shorthand name for quick and easy screen recordings.

And it’s a keeper! Since I’m not a fan of excessive Chrome extensions these days, Im happy to have the choice of Loom’s desktop software or an extension. Loom also has a really lovely Privacy for Humans policy on their website, which outlines data they collect and explanation for all the tools they use to run and analyze the software.

Loom at a glance

Loom records video and audio of your screen and is primarily used for software demonstration: using a new CMS, training someone on Google Analytics, etc. Its easy-to-use desktop software captures your screen and mic in tandem, then saves your video immediately to the Loom platform for editing and sharing.

The tools’s strength is in its extremely fast processing and sharing of these screen recording videos. Sharing a minute-long demo video directly with a client or embed in your help center is far easier than uploading to YouTube or a video hosting platform like Wistia. Those channels have their place, but Loom serves a more immediate, less produced need.

When you have bad takes, you have to go into the platform and delete them, but the casual, one-off nature of Loom means that your word flubs and ums and ahs are more acceptable, most of the time.

If you want to use your Loom videos elsewhere, you can download. Or, if they’re super amazing, you can make them public and indexable in Google search via toggle.

Loom’s low price point and extremely flexible nature puts it almost in the too-good-to-be-true category. Will it be purchased by one of the big tech players and or eventually become extraordinarily expensive? Maybe, but I’m not here to speculate on that.

For the moment, Loom is worth the low monthly cost of easy demonstration videos.

Content tech links of the week

Not a lot of substance this week; I’m probably missing everything.

• New Google tech for reporters. I’ll check into it next week.

• Ads on Substack: it’s a thing, of course. Via Digiday. Medialyte’s take on the same topic goes more in depth.

• Why social media startup culture — especially Facebook — isn’t set up to fix the problems it has created, via The Information. I liked this take because it’s not just “Facebook bad”; the closing paragraphs give suggestions for how companies can be structured to better address societal problems in the

• If I’m a vampire, an extended theoretical essay on media subculture is basically fresh blood, even if one of the subcultures it discusses is Phish. (H/T to Office Hours for linking this one.)

This concludes our spookyish October! Have a safe Halloweekend and if you’re in the U.S., please vote, even if you don’t want to because you’re tired of everyone telling your to vote.

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In this week’s issue:

• Killing 404 and 301 zombie links on your website

• A review of the best zombie killing tool, Screaming Frog

• Content tech links of the week

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Subscriptions are free forever for the first 1,000 subscribers, and we’re close… very close… with more Content Technologist features in the works.

The undead links of websites past: How zombies get in the way of web crawlers

On the internet there are zombies everywhere. Zombies are different from bots; they represent what once was but is no longer, the remnants of our digital past, the bits that were once human.

Zombies live at suck.com and televisionwithoutpity.com and wherever Alex Balk’s byline used to appear.

Snowfall, the interactive content from the New York Times, is is a bit of a zombie these days. The video thumbnails load, but the video doesn’t play.

As research for this newsletter (so committed), I watched Night of the Living Dead for the first time and totally loved it.

Social network zombies are abundant: not only Friendster and MySpace but also the network hoppers who stop using their Facebook/Insta/Twitter for a year, then get a new outlook on life and make a different Facebook profile, quit after a few months, then repeat until they have 17 zombie social media profiles and none of them works. Digital zombies are part of our offline identity.

I care for a zombie, a defunct local news magazine website that hasn’t been updated since 2012. I should probably retire the whole thing, but I’m proud of the work our team did, so it sits, benign and probably begging to be hacked with malware. (I don’t know if upgrading to https is worth the archival value. Probably not, but I can’t bear to let it go.)

If you run a website, you likely have some zombie-fied parts too — the links that go nowhere, or that redirect to new links that differ from the original content. Those are zombies.

But with the right knowhow and the right set of tools, we can fight zombies. Zombie fights are perfect for days when you need to want to get something done but have minimal motivation to do much of anything with thought.

I prefer Jarmusch’s vampire film, but the zombie one is pretty great too.

Because the way to fight zombies is to kill them off one by one, repeatedly, the same way they showed up in the first place.

How to fight zombie links (aka 404s and 301s)

First, we should understand what we’re dealing with. Two main types of zombies afflict the common website: 404 errors and 301 redirects.

The 404 errors are the most dangerous. Of course it’s bad for user experience if someone clicks on a link that doesn’t work; that’s a no-brainer. But most often 404 errors are hiding deep within the architecture of your website, and your users don’t find them.

What can find those 404 errors deep in your crypts and labyrinthine hallways to nowhere? Search engines.

The one on the left is DuckDuckGo.

A primer for the unfamiliar: Search engines scan all the text and metadata on your website, following every link to its ultimate end—the process is called a crawl. The bot in charge? A spider.* The spider will follow every link it can until you tell it not to, or it runs out of so-called crawl budget.**

Most websites don’t need to plan for crawl budget; if you have under 5,000 pages and everything’s working, search spiders are gonna crawl right through that buddy in no time.

But if the spider finds a dead link, or worse, a hallway full of 404 errors, it’s gonna call “done” way sooner. Spiders and zombies don’t mix. The spider sees one or two zombies and anticipates many more, which, if you’ve seen the movies, is a solid zombie prevention strategy.

There are always more where that came from.

If you want a search engine spider to see all the glorious content you have created and report back to Google, get your zombie 404s out of the way. They are undead, broken and going nowhere.

*It’s my 7th year deep in SEO and I still think the name is cute.

**I generally prefer to link to news/non-content marketing sources, but in this case, the “news” or specialist blog has ads all over it and loads like garbage. I very much prefer the clean, comprehensive version that explains the concept. This is one example of “how to get a link from a specialist even if your website doesn’t rank as high and you’re not an ‘official’ source.”

Combatting the not-dead-yet set: 301 redirects

Developers, UX folks, SEOs, users, everyone knows broken links are bad, so we build safeguards to protect from 404 broken link zombies. We cover the doors and walls with whatever plywood we have available. We mitigate the zombie impact.

When URLs are changed, the best way to communicate that change to a search engine is to implement a 301 redirect. The 301 http status code is the digital equivalent of post office mail forwarding: we don’t live here anymore, so please deliver mail to our new home.

Implementing 301 redirects is a perfect fix when you’re changing a large number of URLs or even domains. The 301 redirect indicates permanence: the old content is lost and gone forever and replaced with new content.

Redirect maps are central in any website redesign process, and good content managers have redirect processes in place to eliminate 404 errors whenever a URL is changed on their site. Take a piece of content down and throw up a new 301 redirect to guide both users and spiders from the old, busted URL to the new hotness. Make sure the 301 is in place in case any readers have bookmarked or linked to the content from external sites.

It works… for a bit.

Just as your best friend and sidekick will likely become zombiefied before the end of the film, 301 redirects can come back to bite you. One 301 redirect is fine. However, two or more 301 redirects in a row indicates that you may have a zombie problem.

The mail forwarding analogy works best, even though it has nothing to do with zombies: At least in the U.S., the post office will implement forwarding from one old address to a new address once, for a few months. The USPS will not follow you around from home to home, trying to find you at your new address. The system can’t handle that kind of change.

Search crawlers behave similarly. Search spiders will crawl through one 301 redirect, maybe two, and say, “ok, great, the new content is at a new address and I will let everyone know about it.”

When there are multiple 301 redirects in a row — especially within the same domain — that’s a signal to a spider that hey! There may be zombies. There may be 404 errors, more 301 errors, who knows. The spider just knows that the content is harder to reach and may turn away in favor of clearer, zombie-free roads.

Search engine spiders will absolutely avoid the train to Busan.

Technically, the links aren’t broken and if a user follows the link, they’ll arrive at the new content eventually. But they definitely appear shadier than working links — we’ve all been redirected to an unfamiliar website before. Where are you taking me? we ask the redirected. Will I find the content I seek? Or will there be malware?***

For search engines, redirects take up time and energy and crawl budgets. Like all automations, computers are doing some heavy lifting on your behalf. It’s in everyone’s best interest to make the path to content as unobstructed and zombie-free as possible.

***Every time you use a URL shortener or QR code, you’re using a 301 redirect. Make sure that’s the only 301 redirect before you get to the content. I’ve learned from experience — and maybe this is only my generation who downloaded boatloads of viruses onto our college computers while we were pirating music and movies? — but unless I absolutely trust you as a source, I’m not clicking on your random URL shortener if you don’t tell me exactly where I’m going.

301 redirects and website redesigns

If you’re redesigning a website and changing URLs, you are already going to have a slew of 301 redirects in place. That’s why it’s so crucial to ensure that there are no other internal redirects upon launch: Redirect chains are bad for users, for search crawlers, and they add up.

How does this happen with new websites? Usually a developer enters a URL in building a page that’s not the final URL. Either they didn’t have the final list of URLs or, even more often, someone flubbed a typo and all the automated links in the site’s most important directory say “contnet” instead of “content.”

The error is discovered during the QA/proofing process and yeah: it’s a huge pain to change all the internal links to every page whose primary directory is /contnet-management/ instead of /content-management/.

What often happens: to ensure the launch timeline stays on track, developers implement a quick redirect so every link on the site that pointed to the typo now redirects to the fancy new page. But it’s about as sustainable as punching a zombie in the arm.

Implementing internal 301s before a website is even launched is the equivalent to a zombie movie with the first scene set in a graveyard. The undead are on their way and they’re going to show up sooner rather than later.

The URL typo that never ends…

Yes, it’s a massive pain to change all of your internal links before launch. I totally get it. Hopefully you’re working with a CMS that lets you write a script to rewrite internal links en masse. With many newer CMSes, especially the no-code ones that are gaining popularity, you may have to rewrite them all individually.

But leaving them in means you’re starting with a mess, and search spiders don’t like messes.

Redesigns already mean that you’re changing URLs on most content. Before spiders even get to your website they’ve already encountered one redirect. Once they find all of these others that say “contnet” but redirect to “content,” they’ve established that your site has two redirects in a row. A redirect chain, the name for two or more 301s in a row, is a sign you may be kinda unhealthy. Maybe not trustworthy. Maybe decaying before your time. Maybe full of zombies.

If you want to be found, you have to ensure that spiders don’t think your site is filled with zombies.

How to find and fix your on-site 404 and 301 errors in one fell swoop

Obviously you can’t fix any errors outside of your own website. But I assure you, even the best of us gather broken links (404s) and redirects (301s) over the course of a year. They’re negligible errors in a one-off, but they add up and become a zombie problem.

To fix it, you need the right tools: a web crawler like Screaming Frog (freemium, reviewed below) or any other SEO/content audit tool should do the trick.

You can also access the Coverage report in Google Search Console, although it’s not quite as comprehensive and easy to use as a crawler. It’s like coming prepared to a zombie fight with a lighter, rather than a torch.

You can also crawl websites that are not live yet — and I suggest you crawl several times before you launch to ensure the healthiest website possible.

Here’s how to fix the errors on your own site.

1. Use a website crawler to scan your website just like a search engine. I use Screaming Frog, a freemium crawler reviewed here today. However, pretty much any website audit tool embedded into SEO or content auditing software can find your broken links.

2. Most web crawl tools present their crawl results in a spreadsheet. If you can, choose only HTML pages. Sort by status code.

3. Dive into the 404 errors first, as they are the most deadly: which pages on your site are linking to them? Good crawl tools will highlight all the internal pages that link to the 404 error. In Screaming Frog, they’re called Inlinks, but every tool is slightly different.

4. From there: hop into the healthy page your CMS with the unhealthy zombie links. Isolate the link you want to change, fix that link text, save and republish.

5. Next, tackle the 301 errors. Make sure you change the link to the page where the content is actually living. Copy and paste the URL from the link destination itself — do not type it in manually or you are asking for trouble.****

6. Finally, if your crawler highlights external, or offsite links, (most do), fix all the links offsite that end in 404s and 301s. Find better content worth linking, or eliminate the link entirely.

Here’s a little video I made, demonstrating the process with Screaming Frog. It’s quite easy, but it’s tedious.

Once you’re done cleaning your zombies, your users and search traffic will thank you.

****There are broken links on my website because I do not follow my own advice here.

I wish there were better tools for cleaning up social media zombie accounts as well, but tbh they’re all a little shady. While they’re finding dead followers in Instagram or Twitter, I’m always wondering what other data they’re gathering and sending. If you have social zombie-killing tools you’d recommend, reach out or

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Next Thursday, for the final week of horror month, we’ll cover some tactics for conquering big bads: monsters, vampires, kaiju, the seemingly unconquerable villains… stay tuned.

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The gold standard in web crawlers: Screaming Frog review

When recommending tech for clients, my number one rule is: Don’t change what’s already working. Keep what’s already doing its job well.

Software companies and SEO agencies are always trying to make a better, sexier web crawler than Screaming Frog, which compared to all the pretty new tools out there, looks more like a DOS screen every year. But good old SF does its job, quickly, with few frills. It’s utilitarian, it’s worth every penny of the low license fee, and I know how to use it.

Screaming Frog is free for basic crawls up to 500 pages, and for most small websites, that’s all you need. An annual license for the unlimited full-featured version is under $200 in the current exchange rate.

Screaming Frog at a glance

In addition to identifying html status errors like 404s and 301s, Screaming Frog can illuminate a number of technical SEO issues, including:

• Duplicate content identification

• Missing titles, meta descriptions, and header tags

• Overly long or incorrectly implemented page and meta content

• Canonicalization

• Site structure

• Structured data/schema markup

• Google snippet demo visualization

The tool generates high-quality sitemaps, links with Google Analytics and Search Console for individual page analysis, crawls Javascript websites that are harder to read than standard HTML, and generally supplies everything you need to audit a website’s health.

You can find oodles of resources to help you with Screaming Frog analysis. I like SF’s tutorials and this guide from Seer Interactive.

It’s mostly a professional-grade SEO or content auditing tool, but it’s worth learning if you want to get into the nitty gritty of website maintenance.

Content tech links of the week

• Did something happen with Google this week? J/k. Here’s Matt Stoller, the monopoly expert, and his concise summary and links.

• Google is indexing page passages now. Something like this is actually happening on my website, and I’ll explore in the future, for now here is Search Engine Land.

• Ten years after many gambits to change the local news ecosystem, the future of local news is still strange. Here’s a couple of reasons to hope in Mark Stenberg’s Medialyte. And here’s why you should be wary, from the NYT.

• Branded dives into how brands may fund misinformation even if they’ve already added a problematic website to their blocklist.

• The Algorithmic Justice League is hosting a Drag vs. AI facial recognition event/virtual Halloween party, and it looks mega fun.

• An odd and Halloweeny study of how our private playlist behaviors may shape public lives.

Fer funsies

• My Halloween Spotify playlist, which is meant to be shuffled. All my favorite menacing pop and rock songs, some movie themes, yes Rocky Horror, no Disney, yes Werewolf Bar Mitzvah.

• Some friends created a very fun Parenting x Scary Movies podcast, and even though I’m not a parent, it’s very much fun.

Visit The Content Technologist! About. Ethics. Features Legend. Pricing Legend.

This week:

• Intro to our house of horrors

• Why learning analytics is good for content strategists and creators

• Changes coming to the new Google Analytics 4 setup

• What you should do right now about GA4

• A special offer for Content Technologist subscribers

• Links, per usual

No review this week because I learned GA4 yesterday, so I’m gonna let that count!

You can’t get rid of the Googadook

I enjoy a good scary movie. I steer clear of gore for gore’s sake, but I will happily watch a solidly thinky, too-pretentious horror flick with clever storytelling and stunning visuals.

The one type of horror film I hate, though, is an it’s inside the house movie. I was a kid who was scared of the dark, so things that go bump in the night can happen anywhere but in my closets, thanks. I don’t enjoy being frightened in general, and calling into question my one safe place is not my idea of fun. Paranormal Activity will always be a hard no. I couldn’t finish The Babadook because I was too frightened, although friends had told me “The Babadook is as scary as Rosemary’s Baby.”

No way, The Babadook is wayyy scarier than Rosemary’s Baby. For me, anyway.

I want my house to feel safe, especially this year.

This week I was planning on writing an essay about Google Analytics setup and analysis errors that feel inside the house, that make our data foundations feel unstable. I had a whole kooky setup that involved inflated bounce rate monsters and tentacles made from out-of-context line graphs.

And then Big Goog literally dissolved the floor beneath me when it announced its transition to a new analytics interface, Google Analytics 4. Goodbye, comfortable professional house. Hello, evil twin.

I tried to rewrite my original house-themed horror post with the new Google Analytics 4 context in mind, but it was really dorky. When I found myself near tears, it was like: woman, there’s no need to commit to some goofy spoofy essay about bounce rate creatures when Google is likely nixing bounce rate. I’ve seen far too many other monsters in 2020 to be felled by one of my own imagination.

Admittedly, I wasn’t jazzed about the sudden new Google Analytics changes. The framework I’ve relied on for so many years — at least I will always have GA for content analytics, and it’s free! — shifted drastically.

Of the big tech companies, I’ve always favored Google because of its analytics and the data it gives away for free. But at the end of the day, my reliance on Google for my income often feels like a trap, like some Babadook that also shops for my groceries and serves me dinner while it slowly takes over my home.

I did not finish watching The Babadook, but I read the plot summary on Wikipedia.

High level: Google Analytics 4 is certainly different, and it’s clear Google wants you to use it to purchase more ads. It’s going hard on the predictive analytics, real-time trends and automated insights that are very sexy to describe but don’t always stand up when you start asking hard questions about sustainability.

But the high-quality good content analytics are still there in GA4, and they’re souped up with audience analysis, out-of-the-box event tracking and better engagement metrics.

My tentpole landing pages report will disappear, but different reports will grow in its place. Privacy protections are much better, and on-site behavioral analytics will be easier to prioritize.

Watching your house shift overnight and your old software buddies turn to skeletons is part of digital life. Like all aspects of marketing and the entire concept of capitalist markets, digital measurement is full of ghosts and sprits, inaccuracies and faux trends, shady attempts at attribution models, trackers that we don’t understand, different sets of numbers from one tool to the next.

The best content marketers and publishers can do is understand the core software we’re working with — and the methods and theory behind it —and use it to make better decisions about how we create and distribute content.

C’est la guerre algorithmique!

If you’re looking for non-scary experimental horror films about houses, I highly recommend the 70s Japanese cult classic House (aka Hausu), which is on Criterion and HBO Max rn. It’s bonkers in all the best ways.

Now I’ll leave the weird horror metaphors behind.

The new Google Analytics 4, explained for content operators

The new Google Analytics 4 will eventually replace the Universal Analytics setup that was introduced in 2012. I’m sure it will be at least two years until most companies fully transition to Analytics 4, but eventually the old UI most likely be deprecated and permanently replaced.

Google’s been testing the interface for about a year, in a feature called Web + App, but I’ve previously ignored because I only use Web and not App. The new setup is still technically in Beta.

You can transition to the new GA4 today, while maintaining your old Universal Analytics profile. Run them both concurrently, especially since GA4 will only start populating data from the day you install it. Almost no one’s going to have GA4 data from before October 14, 2020.

You probably don’t have brain space to learn a new analytics tool in 2020. I don’t blame you. But one day, I advise getting to know content analytics standards so you can read and react to the new platform.

Or you can ignore it and let someone else make the decisions for you. That works when you have an analytics partner you trust. But that’s not the case in many organizations.

Why do content strategists even need to learn analytics?

Content has never been just words. I encourage digital content strategists — whether you’re in content marketing, media production, or analytics — to become certified in Google Analytics. It’s not only a career-advancer, it’s also a job protector.

I’m not a fan of the “everyone needs to know and do everything” school of thought. Writers don’t need to learn code (kinda wish more coders would learn to write tho). Graphic designers don’t need to learn the intricacies of grammar. Reporters don’t need to learn deep content strategy, and content strategists don’t need to know how to file a breaking news story. We all have specialized skills.

For me, though, knowing content analytics is part of fact-checking: an essential digital content skill. You don’t need to know statistics or forecasting; you just need to understand what’s happening with your content.

Understanding at least the basics of Google Analytics, aka content analytics, is a crucial dimension for knowing how the content we create affects business performance as a whole. Why?

• Content creators who understand analytics are able to build data stories and create more nuanced, strategic insights that drive results faster and more predictably than any AI-generated analytics tool.

  Why? AI-generated analytics “insights” are more like highlights. They spot patterns and abnormalities, an unusual increase here or a higher-than-average segment there. When many analytics n00bs read those auto-generated insights, they tend to think the recommendation is “do more/less of that one tactic” without understanding the circumstances of the full story.

  Storytellers and content creators are deft at putting those pattern anomalies in context, adept at seeing the full picture. They can also identify healthy and sustainable growth trends, which are far more important to business growth than random spikes and barely impactful rando segments.

• Similarly, content folks make data scientists’ lives easier. Even if your data scientist is pulling out gobs of worthwhile data stories, a content partner who speaks analytics can translate those stories to editorial actions more clearly. Writers and data folk working together make beautiful collaborations. Add in a visual designer and *chef’s kiss*!

• Understanding analytics is a fabulous bullshit detector. When your boss says something like, “Let’s make more of the clickbait stuff,” analytics knowledge helps you demonstrate why that’s a bad idea. When Kendall Roy eliminates your digital media property with Your bounce rates are low, you can combat him with better data and the knowledge that low bounce rates have never been an indicator of failure (knowing full well it doesn’t matter because his dad told him to but at least you tried).

  

  There is a scene before this one where Kendall talks about bounce rates and metrics and he clearly doesn’t know his ass from his elbow and it drove me nuts because it was so realistic.

  And when your advertising sales team says something like, “We need to keep the Luxury content! It’s getting so many pageviews and Richie Rich loves it,” a skilled content analyst can counter, “But the Luxury content actively drives regular readers away, while the LowFi content is attracting more faithful audiences.” (A bit of an ideal-world hypothesis, but really: very few people look at the luxury brand content.)

  Once you understand analytics, the smoke and mirrors around digital marketing and, really, the entire advertising industry will start looking like gas and glass.

• Most of us highly verbal folk dropped math courses from our schedules as soon as we could in favor of more creative classes. Knowing analytics helps exercise your math muscles and generally become more rounded. You’ll get better at reading all data — like COVID-19 graphs and polling trends. And GA is not even that much math, it’s mostly just playing with pretty graphs.

• Massage your own ego with the knowledge of how well your content performs.

• Come to terms with your own limitations with the knowledge that your content doesn’t always perform as well as you would like it to and maybe you need to spend some time on your website.

With that said: here’s the skinny on changes from the old Universal Analytics and the new Google Analytics 4.

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10 big changes in Google Analytics 4 that publishers and content analysts should know

1. More focus on users and sessions, less on traffic like pageviews. Daily, monthly and weekly average users are now calculated for you, so there’s not as much custom setup involved.

2. More info on customized audiences and lifetime value. Audiences have been available in Universal Analytics for a few years, but the GA4 interface provides more information for comparing audiences and finding the true value of loyalty.

   

3. The brand new engaged user metric highlights users who have either been on a page for 10 seconds, visited more than two pages, or converted. Sure, 10 seconds is a low threshold for anything at all, but it’s better than the nothing from before! With this metric, GA4 is absolutely trying to compete with Parsely and other engaged-time analytics tools.

4. The engaged time metric isolates only the time users are actively reading the website, which is more accurate than straight session duration. The new metric eliminates tab dormancy time, a metric I just invented that describes how much time websites spend sitting open in tabs, waiting to be read or closed out. (Anticipation time? Wishful tabbing duration? I would actually love a breakdown of how much time users spend actively reading versus letting tabs gather dust, but Google’s not going to invest in that human interest story.)

5. Content-specific events like scroll depth tracking are now automatically tagged, so you don’t need to set up custom event tags in Google Tag Manager.

6. The new setup also automatically tracks clicks on links off-site, which will be massively helpful for understanding user path and experience. Before this event metric was difficult to set up and use properly, so I’m stoked about this feature.

7. We’ve got consent mode! Or at least, we will eventually have consent mode. I haven’t seen the best way to implement setup mode, but this interview with a Google rep in SearchEngineLand says that it’s coming. Easily remove user data when requested and comply with the law, or just be a good web citizen in general. Consent is fantastic, and if a marketer or advertiser thinks customer consent is a roadblock to success, please don’t give them your business.

8. More focus on real time metrics than in Universal Analytics. GA4 moves real tie metrics to the forefront. In my experience, real time recommendations distract from long-term vision and distract from solid content strategies. Finding good data in real time is similar to refreshing your Twitter feed every 30 seconds and expecting to see something genuinely life-changing.

   Also real time analytics are part of a surveillance mindset and contribute to bad content practices like trendhopping or newsjacking that make the web a dumpster fire of halfbaked misinformation and thin content. Websites shouldn’t be 24-hour tv news networks! What is “real time” anyway?

   Gripes aside, I’ll take my historical weekly and monthly content data, thank you, but GA4 has more real time metrics if you want to drive yourself and your staff crazy.

9. Deprecation of metrics like bounce rate! The elimination of the organic keyword report, which has been useless for 7 years! Lots of consolidation of old reports into a more organized, meaningful fashion.

10. All website health metrics have moved over to Search Console for good. Site speed is no longer available in GA4, probably for everyone’s benefit. You’ll still be able to see device- and browser-specific dropoff points in GA4, which is helpful for diagnostics, but for the most part: Search Console will be the technical website performance go-to in the future.

What are the long-term implications of the GA4 interface?

Google Analytics is the standard for web analytics, and we’ll all eventually follow the slight shift in terminology and reporting because the Googadook lives in our house.

Because Google Analytics is free — and that’s really where they getcha — it’s the single best benchmark for comparative performance on the web. I trust that Google Analytics numbers are collected the same from website to website. They’re more reliable than ComScore numbers as far as I’m concerned.

Although it’s in the midst of an antitrust investigation, GA4 is clearly trying to ape Parsely’s and Chartbeat’s focus on actively engaged users and real-time content analytics. That’s not to say GA4 will replace either of those publishing-focused tools, but when you’re looking to cut costs, if you have two sets of software that measure almost exactly the same metrics, and one is free, well…

The new interface puts equivalent weight on real-time, content lifecycle and audience analysis, which will likely be a boon to most devoted marketing and analysts in the long-run. The cookieless setup and privacy compliance are also excellent developments for the web in the long run.

As a publisher and consultant: the most immediate advantage is automated events tracking. No more hiring a custom analytics consultant, creating a detailed taxonomy for outside link clicks, or deciphering what qualifies as a non-interaction event for basic tracking tasks: the new GA tags your site right off the bat.

But after setup, the out-of-the-box advantages are not as apparent. Custom reports need to be constructed. You still need to know a fair number of specific definitions and customized terms to make GA4 make sense.

Straight up: I don’t think the new interface will be easier to read for analytics beginners and small business owners. Training on how to use the new interface and setting up custom reports to hone in on content performance will be necessary.

You should start collecting data for Google Analytics 4 ASAP.

Set up Google Analytics 4 now so you can start collecting data. The new interface doesn’t analyze retroactively, so it will only collect data beginning on the day you set it up. You can return to your custom reports and actually using GA4 later, but just get the data in there as soon as you can.

For a long time — probably two years, I’m guessing — you’re going to be toggling between reports in Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 as your teams get up to speed on the new setup. I don’t think you need to learn the intricacies of GA4 just yet, but again: start filling it with data and it’ll be there for you when you’re ready to switch.

In the meantime, if you don’t understand Google Analytics already, now’s your time to start anew.

Some important concepts that are carrying over include metrics, dimensions, events, sessions, channel, source, medium, and scroll depth. Spend your time learning what those mean in the context of a website, and you’ll be in a good spot to get to know GA4 once data populates in your new property.

A special offer for Content Technologist subscribers

If you are a brand or publisher and receive thousands of visitors per month, I’m offering a limited number of Google Analytics 4 setup packages at an immensely reduced price.

GA4 special offer

What’s in it for me? I learn the tool and get more practice.

What’s in it for you? You get deeply discounted fresh new content analytics.

This offer’s limited to 5 applicants from corporate brand or publisher side. Ideally you regularly publish web content, are interested in growing or maintaining an audience, and attract at least 5k visitors on a monthly basis. (More than that is completely welcome.) Sorry, agencies and freelancers, it’s not for you, but watch this space for more in the near future.

Content tech links of the week

• Ernest Wilkins’ Office Hours is a delightful marketing-oriented newsletter that’s the inbox highlight of my Monday. This week Wilkins dives into the Share of Culture metric, which I can absolutely get behind (it’s paid, but worth it).

• Developing for the semantic web, via Smashing Magazine. Semantic content will likely be the future of web content, as long as we can get our poop in a group.

• How do we fix journalism’s trust crisis? Two very different frameworks are out there, in this study summary in Nieman Lab. (Guess which one I advocate! You’re right, it’s engagement journalism!)

• The W3C is working on new standards for Content Aggregation Technology that don’t involve Google, Facebook, or Apple. Cool! Do I understand them? No! But I’m trying to dive into this report.

• You should know: Google is providing personalized keyword search data to law enforcement, which is not ok on so many levels. Do I know what to do about it? Not yet. But maybe use Duck Duck Go if you’re going to do research for crimes.

As always, please

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See you next week for some zombieeeeessssssssss

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CT education/community survey

I’ll be responding to everyone this week.

In this week’s Content Technologist:

• How to identify horrific website UX that will likely be penalized by an upcoming Google algorithm update

• A review of development-friendly product content tool Strings

• A monster list of links about race in media, best practices for blogging, fonts, trolling AI facial recognition software, and more

Four weeks of October internet horrors

One of my least favorite content/UX strategist traditions is shit-talking websites or content initiatives that others have clearly worked hard to make as good as they can.

Especially since I’m a fan of a cross-disciplinary approach to content, putting down others’ poorly structured information architecture or weird navigation items introduces negativity when, generally, most people who have worked on websites have put together what they think is a good user experience.

Whether you work in content strategy, SEO, journalism, content marketing, user experience, web development, product content, advertising, or social media: you want your audience to enjoy and find value in the work that you do. You don’t want them to have a bad time at the content party.

That said, 2020 has preyed upon our worst fears, our constant WFH means we’re spending wayyyy too much time online even when we would like to spend less, and all the little digital annoyances that used to seem like not-that-big-of-a-deal suddenly appear horrifically grotesque.

But it’s the month where we confront our greatest fears! I’m not referencing actual current events relating to the U.S. election, economic downturn and pandemic; I’m talking about scary movies!

For the remainder of October I’m describing some frightening content technological realities in context of our favorite scary movie tropes.

So, sit back, relax, and join me on a very creepy descent into website BODY HORROR.

The Content Technologist is free forever for the first 1,000 subscribers. And we’re almost there! So if you have any friends, colleagues, clients, supervisors, students, pets, children, or enemies who may dig this newsletter and might want to save a few dollars:

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Somehow, it’s still alive: The web content disease that sprung from within

It all started with a surplus of cursed lemongrass.

After the abundance of late summer, October farmers’ market selections in the Twin Cities slim out significantly. Aside from ubiquitous honeycrisp apples and sad end-of-season tomatoes, we’re mostly left with roots, tubers and cabbage. To cheer myself up in the flavor desert, I snagged a massive bundle of southeast Asian staple lemongrass for a mere $2.

My initial recipe inspiration — ginger lemongrass carrot soup — used but one stalk! I had purchased eight. It’s lean times, I thought, and life bequeathed me lemongrass. Surely I could squeeze some value from the excess.

Little did I know the horror waiting in store for me.

Lemongrass recipes, I Googled.

I know enough about blind recipe searches to know that I should really rely on trusted sites, especially for unfamiliar recipes. I’ve certainly made some duds from unproven food blogs. But ah! some ideas! I tapped on a promising collection from a familiar media brand that had served me well in the past: 38 lemongrass recipe ideas. I barely loaded the navigation bar when…

Egads! The website crashed my mobile!

No worries, I thought, my trusty laptop computer will be able to handle this household food media brand’s recipe ideas collection.

After all, I’d optimized recipe collections just like this one for several household food brands and media companies. This brand sat atop search results for a reason: its high-quality content and well-rated recipes around lemongrass.

I clicked into the gaggle of Thai- and Vietnamese-inspired dishes. And I waited.

After a few seconds I impatiently scrolled down to the first recipe in the collection, whose image was a bit blurry because no CDN? homegrown media company servers? Anyway, the header text indicated a beef recipe and I try not to eat too much beef so I kept scrolling.

Imagine my horror when, after several severals of seconds the website was not fully loaded.

Suddenly my eyes began to twitch. All the pictures on the website flashed, as if my vision was blurred.

Every time I’d scroll to an image or recipe the content would shift downward or rightward or off my screen as a new content block loaded.

I bet the ad is taking so long to load because it’s personalized, I thought. It will certainly be an ad relevant to my interests, perhaps additional lemongrass recipes or maybe a cool plastic kitchen gadget like a 3D-printed lemongrass-shaped box to store spare lemongrass.

But instead of something clever and new, the advertisement was strangely familiar... as my eyes began to bleed I realized that I was viewing an ad for a SaaS where I’ve been a paying client for more than 18 months. I see this ad at least 3 times a day. (Srsly SEMRush, please cookie me or something.)

Approximately 30 seconds later a grand total of 10 of the 40 recipe ideas — and none of the recipes themselves, as those are on separate pages — had fully loaded.

And then a video sidebar started autoplaying an insurance commercial.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is hardly a horror movie, but surprisingly few “eyes bleeding” gifs show up in search, and, well, this one’s a classic.

Diagnosing a bad website in 2020

Bad website experiences for content-heavy are rarely any one person’s or any one team’s fault. Like all inadequate systems, bad websites are piles of mediocre decisions and unsatisfying compromises, usually due to several of the following:

1. Misunderstanding scope: We have no idea how much work actually solving the problem will be, and more often than not it’s way more complicated than we originally intended.

2. Lack of resources: We don’t have enough money, human brains or time to do the best possible development, testing and execution of the planned initiative.

3. Band-aids and oversimplification: We use plug-ins and third party software to remedy complex problems, instead of holistically incorporating into the whole website ecosystem.

4. No product ownership: Each piece of the web puzzle—content, development, advertising, subscriptions, customer service, optimization—is created by siloed teams who don’t work together and don’t understand how their single tiny remedy fix affects the whole web experience.

5. Desperation: We need more money and are willing to compromise user experience for some extra cash or just an end to a project that’s been going on too long.

Add in the ever-mutating factor of rapid tech change — finicky optimization guidelines, sexy new javascript frameworks, indecipherable data management and privacy regulations, decaying back-end servers that can’t handle fancy front-end ambitions, faster devices, slower mobile networks, and inconsistent user behaviors — and we’ve got a website horrorshow reminiscent of early David Cronenberg films.

We can’t avert our eyes because we’re deeply in need of a new soup recipe.

But as web, UX and content strategists we can start with some diagnostics:

• What is my audience’s state of mind (aka intent) when they reach a certain page from search, email, social or any other channel?

• What content do they see first? Not the content actually written on the page, but the navigation, the images loading, the related content widgets, and the ad units.

• Does content shift on the page as it loads on any device?

In the above story, I’m a user literally looking for ideas, expecting that I’m going to click through to another recipe as I’ve been trained to do during the past 15 years of researching recipes online. All I really need is a list of recipe names, maybe an identification of any special ingredients or equipment needed for a recipe, and maybe a thumbnail image.

A recipe collection is what I’d consider a gateway page. It directs users to other pieces of content. It doesn’t need to be more complex than a categorized list. But it does need to load quickly and avoid frustrating the user.

Understanding core web vitals and similar metrics

Earlier this year, Google announced that its Core Web Vitals metrics would become instrumental in its algorithm sometime in 2021. These vital signs are:

• Largest contentful paint - how long it takes for content to fully load on your website. Google says it should be “within 2.5 seconds” of the First Contentful Paint, a metric SEOs and devs long used to identify how long it takes for the first significant identifiable content to load on your website.

• First input delay - how long it takes for an interactive website action, like a click, to display results. Google says it should be 100 milliseconds.

• Cumulative layout shift - how much the actual content on the page moves around as it loads. In Google’s metrics, this measure should be .01.

The powers that be have also acronymed these metrics for your ongoing confusion, and you can view LCP, FID and CLS under the engagement reports in Search Console.

Historically, Google’s ideal technical thresholds have always been so high that it’s extremely difficult for any website to meet the requirements, so much that I’ve seen marketers and developers dismiss them altogether. (“Even Google.com doesn’t meet its own PageSpeed requirements!” a development partner once said.)

My extremely basically designed and Ghost-hosted secure website still registers as Poor for CLS, probably because of my lefthand sidebar. I don’t think the .1 CLS threshold is remotely reasonable for most websites with complex information. But that doesn’t mean you should throw out the metric entirely.

Instead, benchmark and aim for improvement. Look at your website — ad blockers off, with an incognito window. Would the content shifts be annoying to someone who is not only casually searching for information, but reading that information as well?

Benchmarking core web vitals

When you need hard data to benchmark your own and others’ sites: Use Google’s Lighthouse and PageSpeed tester. To corroborate data from the big G, use WebPageTest.org (yes, it’s a real website and it’s great!). But these tests are mostly lab emulators,* which means that they replicate the experience of a page load. They often produce false positive results, a common result of computers automating human jobs.

And you’re making content for humans who don’t want their eyes to bleed out.

My guidelines for benchmarking:

1. If they come up with negative results, yikes! You probably have the data you need to make the case for investing in better web performance. But you should still run your own tests.

2. If they come up with positives — lots of green lights — cool. But corroborate with your own data from using the site.

3. Look at your website — ad blockers off, with an incognito window. Use screen video recorders if you need to document the experience (varies depending on device, OS, but they’re easy to find).

4. If the website is slow on desktop or patchy, that’s bad. That means it’s even slower on mobile, and in 2020 we optimize for mobile experiences.

5. If the website is fast on desktop, you should still test on mobile.

6. As the website is loading, consider the mindset of your user. Based on the page’s core topic and the kinds of search queries that attract them, are they searching for quick information or in-depth explanation?

User experience and page load metrics are crucial to keep readers around, and our goal with content is to build regular revenue-generating audiences. Neither advertisers nor users want a frustrating content experience, and you won’t make any money if your website doesn’t load.

Not only that — they are going to become ranking factors in the Google search algorithm, which means that you stand less of a chance of driving traffic you don’t have to pay for. Unlike social networks, whose content algorithms have historically changed at whim, Google is becoming more transparent about exactly what it values.

Read more about core web vitals from Moz and Backlinko, the only two devoted SEO blogs that don’t have an absolute garbage web experience.

But I still hadn’t figured out what to do with my lemongrass yet…

What UX evil hath I wrought in the name of content value?

After about ten minutes of waiting and scrolling and waiting and scrolling, I’ve tabbed up ten or so potential recipes. I’m still shuddering from my earlier browsing frights as each tab turns from wheel-of-anticipation to fully loaded favicon.

On the most promising recipe, I scrolled down to the ingredients. I have most of these in house, I thought. Ginger, coconut milk, chicken stock…

Suddenly the entire list of ingredients had disappeared. Where had they gone? I scrolled down, assuming that a content unit had pushed them farther on the page, but suddenly I was in the reviews section.

“I made this recipe except I subbed out soy milk for coconut milk and lemons for lemongrass and it did not turn out as expected. One star,” one comment read.

“Excellent recipe,” another reader wrote. Brevity is the soul of filler content, I guess.

My stomach gurgled a little bit. After all, I’d been searching for recipes so long I was half an hour late to begin dinner prep.

Turns out I actually needed to scroll up from the reviews to read the full recipe. This whole process making me nauseous. I should just stick to all those cookbooks I bought at the beginning of the pandemic. But I was at the point of no return.

Jotting down the ingredients, I scanned the method. All seventeen preparatory steps were lumped into one giant hunk of text, never to be broken down into an ordered list that’s been a part of web design since the early days of html. Still, no matter: at least everything was in one place. Anyway, if the steps were individually <li>ed out, I’d have to deal with some sort of video in between each item.

As I read I blanched at the sight of a never before seen horror. My stomach dropped as my own words echoed in my head, slowed down so that they were super deep, like a demon or maybe some misused autotune.

These tormenting words, all of which I’d said years ago as I advised a client, Use your popular content pages to surface your related content that might interest users. It will increase time on site.

Those words, and others like them spoken from content strategists around the world in the mid-2010s, had led to this:

A rough approximation of my gastro-intestinal state after reading the phrase “wet burger”:

Resolving the web experience horrorshow

The above experience is a hyperbole, of course, but all examples are real — albeit, a compilation of two separate well-known food media publications.

Google hasn’t yet announced the timing of the core web vitals update, but we need to acknoweldge and anticipate the impact it may cause. For many content-heavy websites with ads and dynamic elements, these algo updates may bring significant losses in traffic, so you won’t even get to gross out your audience with clickbait once they arrive!

When we review our web strategies for 2021, let’s ask: how can we make this less of a giant, overgrown, field of open sores? What does this website need to be? How can we reimagine it so we grow an audience? Do we really need to surface a recipe called “wet burger” with no additional context, even if it gets a total of 240 searches per month because of a critically panned restaurant from a meme chef? Will the clickbait annoy as many people as it attracts?

Questions to mitigate the impact of the core web vitals update

Sometime in the next year, the core web vitals update will be implemented, and most of these in-depth technical fixes take significant time and collaboration to execute.

• Is our website putting users in a frustrated state before they even get to the content?

• Are all the dynamically populated content widgets actually making the content experience better?

• Are all of the elements on the page serving a helpful purpose, or are they still there because we “need them for SEO”? (i.e., if CLS and LCP are going to be ranking factors, decide whether a plethora of old reviews are worth the extra load on the site speed)

• If we had one less dynamic or automated element on the page, would it speed up the site enough to make a difference?

• Is our website accessible to all people? (Accessibility and privacy are far more important than aesthetics, but they’re not as in-your-face as the body horror described here.)

• Are people regularly using our chat widgets and newsletter pop-ups, or has the novelty worn off?

• Is our audience up to extra annoyances in their lives? For example, if we’re targeting busy parents, will the site benefit from annoying them, or are we driving them away?

• Are we presenting the content in the best way for the purpose it is supposed to serve?

• If we structured content differently and removed ads, would our audience pay a subscription fee for more convenience? (Massive opportunity for this in recipe pubs with an existing library, fwiw.)

• Identify your risk tolerance: how much revenue could you lose from removing, I dunno, two ad units from your page?

• Or if you removed the native content modules and replaced them with more custom ad units?

• What if you updated the page content to contain more in-depth information, something more relevant to the post-pandemic audience who is willing to sit and learn a little longer?

Check all your annoyance metrics: the core web vitals above, bounce rate, exit rate. Calculate any year-over-year changes in volume of traffic, session duration and time on page from organic search. If the content experience is that poor, you can almost always find several data patterns to back it up.

In the coming decade, especially with the experience of living digitally in 2020, websites that resemble Rosemary’s baby will gradually become irrelevant. We certainly have some fresh horrors in store down the pike, but we can keep the good stuff from festering.

Meanwhile, drop your favorite cookbook recommendations — or your own website horror stories— in the comments. Until the recipe website mess is fixed, I’d rather spend holiday cooking season with some good old-fashioned print.

Next week: It’s coming from inside the house!

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Product writers and developers, unite!: A review of Strings

The early Silicon Valley ethos hinged on engineers building algorithms, user interfaces, graphic design, data collection, and product copy themselves, disdaining the well-honed practices of writers and editors in favor of shipping products quickly.

In the 2010s, the rise of fields like content strategy and content design — and the clear benefits of diverse, collaborative, multidisciplinary thinking — have led more product developers to understand the value of trained writers.

However, the workflow software remained separated. Developers used Github or other similar tools, and writers used Microsoft Office or Google Docs.

When creating or editing product microcopy — from button text to error messages and everything in between — most UX content strategists manually scanned every app and screen, typing out changes to CTAs or navigation items in docs or spreadsheets for developers to copy-paste into their code workflow.

Afterward, everyone QAed (followed quality assurance, or proofreading, processes) the changes after they were made. For both developers and writers, this process has long been a royal pain riddled with errors, compromises and duplicated work.

But a few tools have been recently developed to better structure UX writing for both writers and developers. This week’s tool, Strings, enables product writers to audit and submit corrections into a development workflow.

Strings at a glance

Developers and editors/writers each have their own professional vernacular for certain tasks, even though the actions are essentially the same across disciplines. Throughout this review, I’m going to refer to the development term, followed by the relevant writer/editor term in parentheses.

Like so: Quality assurance/QA (proofreading).

Strings links text editing directly with Github, the industry standard development workflow tool. Once the dev team links Strings with Github, writers can pull all copy strings (sentences, words) from a project (giant hunk of code) or individual code snippets (paragraphs), then they can rewrite and make any needed changes only to text without changing touching the code itself.

The text edits then become pull requests (track changes/suggested edits) that are communicated back to Github. Developers can merge (accept) or close (delete/stet) the changes to the text within their Github workflow. Based on the demo, it’s slick.

Since I’m not using Strings myself, I spoke with a Strings customer, who said the product generally made the product writing clearer for both writers and developers, and eliminated some of the copy/paste work on his end. Strings is still working out a few kinks — mainly around automating communication of product changes — but he noted the customer service has been highly personalized and incredibly responsive for its early adopters.

The customer also mentioned: Strings isn’t really appropriate for minor text changes every now and then, but works best during a larger, more focused effort on product writing as a whole.

Based on this discussion, I recommend Strings for:

• Product teams who are actively auditing and editing large amounts of copy

• Writers and editors who want more visibility into how their brand voice is reflected throughout an application

• Development teams who wish editorial changes weren’t so time consuming

Strings is absolutely a helpful tool for collaboration between wordsmiths and coders and merging multiple specialties into a single product. It solves a very specific problem within product collaboration, helping two separate professional disciplines speak the same language.

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Content tech links of the week

• Ironically, I was reading this piece in Wired about the ineffectiveness of digital ads, and the entire screen shifted so I completely lost my place while I was three paragraphs in. An ad for a Rolex or similar luxury good had loaded, merging both the worst of ad tech and magazine snobbery to completely disturb my reading experience while pouring salt on my non-affluent wound.

• Media 2070 is a deeply researched essay about historical racism in media, newspaper profit from the slave trade to the 20th century policies that solidified media ownership in the hands of white men and the current coverage of the Movement for Black Lives. It’s worth a read no matter what field you work in.

• On the racist history of certain typefaces, from Ceros Originals.

• The Berkman Klein Center study is a must-read for understanding how legacy mass media still has far greater effects on our democracy than any social network.

• Margaret Sullivan’s commentary on the Berkman Klein study in The Bezos Post is also worth a read.

• This week the House Antitrust Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), released a report on big tech platforms, and Matt Stoller’s roundup of its findings is fantastic. I can’t wait to dive into the 400-pager Cicilline Report, especially the sections on big Google.

• Should that link automatically open a new tab? Usually no! No it shouldn’t! But in some circumstances, maybe. An update of old research from the Nielsen Norman Group.

Visit The Content Technologist! About. Ethics. Features Legend. Pricing Legend.

This fall, I’m planning something a little different for The Content Technologist. And I want to be able to work with this audience more closely.

Several of you have asked for more in-depth education, courses or seminars on the topics covered in this newsletter, and I’m happy to say that I’m planning something special for Q4 and into 2021.

Are you interested in more in-person deep-dives on SEO, content measurement, data-driven content planning, information architecture, website redesigns, or other topics dear to The Content Technologist?

This education will be geared toward content professionals, including:

• Freelancers/individuals looking to boost their skills

• Publishers envisioning a fresh approach to content

• Brands and in-house marketing teams looking to innovate in a time of uncertainty

• Content marketing or content strategy agencies looking to add more value to their clients

• Traditional or digital marketing agencies that want to add content marketing or SEO to their roster

• Development agencies looking to incorporate an audience-focused content approach to web and app builds

If you’re interested, please click the button below and fill out the brief survey?

More educational content, please

I’m still figuring out what this education would look like — group workshops, single-team training customized for your needs, or an ongoing course/class with feedback on your professional materials and approaches, so filling out the survey will help a ton. I’m happy to accommodate different styles of working as well.

So do you want to work together, small-scale? I’d love to hear from you.

What do you do, exactly?

I hear this question a lot, and then I say something like, “If it’s content on the internet, I can help plan, publish and distribute that content so that it’s successful without the help of excessive advertising.” But more specifically:

As an independent consultant, I also work with brands, publishers, and agencies on all of the topics covered in this newsletter. Typically these are larger projects that span several months with brands that are looking to take their content planning to the next level of digital maturity. Some services I offer:

• Start-to-finish website redesign planning and consulting — start-to-finish planning for a full website redesign, particularly focused on content-driven websites

  I follow a honed research process that I’ve developed over 7 years of navigating enterprise-level brand website redesigns. (I had forgotten I’d written this blog post during the week that lockdown hit the U.S., but I’m pleased that I had. I should write its successor soon.)

  And here’s an example of a website I helped launch this year.

  I’ve also worked on email newsletter and intranet redesigns, which are always more complicated than they seem. If you have a redesign project in the works, I’m happy to chat with you.

• Data-driven content planning and audience-building — whether you’re full of ideas or the well has run dry, I can help you organize your content strategies and back with SEO and UX data to make the whole workflow more efficient and effective.

  I think about content planning a little differently than most of the other marketing pros and agencies out there.

  I think content is most powerful when it aligns with audience needs, and when your team understands the gravity of what your audience thinks. To do that, I mine your data for how your audience thinks when they’re online — and create visualizations to help your internal team and stakeholders understand that mindset. When coupled with your content goals, this data can make your content marketing plan unstoppable.

• Content design and innovation — Do you want to develop a new content experience that will charm and inform your audience without annoying them? I’m all in for deep thinking, content innovation and testing to get the experience right.

  Here’s one explanation of how I think about information architecture.

  I’m a fan of deep collaboration with designers and brand strategists, where we can use all the capabilities of digital media — not just a replication of print on the web — and deep digital research to create new experiences.

  Have a nebulous content idea that you want to bring to life, with practical considerations for how people actually use digital content? Want to take your publication in a new direction? That’s right up my alley.

• Content analytics and measurement — Are you still unsure how to measure and describe the effectiveness of your content besides traffic? You are not alone!

  Just be warned: I will tell you not to use pageviews, or any traffic metrics.

  I’ll shoo you away from single KPIs.

  Instead I’ll help you consider a measurement approach that’s more suitable for our current digital environment and what will be most effective for your business and your long-term growth and revenue goals.

  I also help with the basics of analytics: setting up reporting, tags, content groupings, dashboards, custom segments, you name it.

• Content tool stack planning - In (most) every issue of this newsletter, I review a different piece of software. And for every review I write, I demo about 5 additional tools that I don’t review. I keep all that information in a database, as well as some strong opinions that I reserve for client meetings.

  I know way too much about content management systems, UX design tools, project management software, marketing automation software, personalization approaches, account-based marketing suites, and plenty of other tools I don’t cover in this newsletter.

  So if you’re looking for a change, I’m happy to help your team evaluate and build your new tool stack, or just gather some recommendations on different types of software.

• Consulting, writing or bespoke education on all of the above. Are you a software company looking to reach content professionals? Or an agency looking to add a new service like SEO or UX to your midst? Or just a marketing team looking to add their first marketing hire? I help with all of those areas and more.

• And if there’s something I don’t offer that you need help with… I’ve recently joined a new marketing co-op with other established freelancers who offer all sorts of marketing services that complement the data-driven digital content research and planning that I do.

  Indee is a one-stop shop if you’re looking for a little of this, a little of that, content assets, copywriting, social media management, or a total branding overhaul, give a shout, and I’m happy to loop you in with the Indee team.

And if you’re looking for something a little more unprofessional

I’ve been kicking around an idea for a guided pop culture discussion group/community for a while, and I just want to see if there’s interest. Kinda like a cultural studies class but wayyyyy lower stakes for busy people. If you’re at all interested in this sort of thing over the winter, please fill out the second survey below.

Hit me up with pop culture goodness

And once more for those who don’t feel like scrolling back up: you can reach me by replying to this email or by filling out the form for

Content Technologist education interest

See you next week with a UX-driven fall food fest!

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Last week’s newsletter discussed a nonprofit Minnesota media company and its recent missteps around outdated conceptions of how media companies should work. This week, Transform MPR group released an open letter to Minnesota Public Radio’s/American Public Media’s audience and their employer, essentially a vote of no-confidence in their senior leadership. APMG president Jon McTaggart resigned, which is a start. Today, employees of the music side of MPR announced their intent to unionize (the newsroom is already unionized). Anyway, here’s to the employees at APMG for standing up to their leadership in solidarity.

In this week’s newsletter:

• How to plan your Q4 and 2021 content and marketing initiatives like you GAF (and how to talk about them so you’re heard)

• A review of interactive content builder Ex.Co

• Links of the week

Planning for 2021 like you GAF about your audience, our digital experience, and our future

No matter where you work or what you do, if you’re here, you’re probably aware, at least a little bit: to fix systemic racism, to remedy climate change, to maintain our own sanity, to give our descendants a better future, we must fundamentally change the way we work.

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, businesses have engaged in some form of what is called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), subsidizing volunteer time or making marginally more ethical choices considering the environment. It’s likely clear to most of you that most CSR initiatives are either greenwashing or white saviorism, doing little to offset the impact on the environment, systemic racism or global inequality.

Radical changes to the way most companies operate, even those considered disruptors, are highly unlikely. BP isn’t going to stop drilling; Cargill isn’t solve world hunger by opening slightly more functional meat processing plants; UnitedHealth isn’t going to stop overcharging for and denying treatment of necessary healthcare. It’s overwhelming and disheartening and can make nihilism look really appealing.

Some days it’s more comfortable to believe in nothing, that we’re powerless. But our conversational acumen and digital awareness makes it easier for those in content marketing and communications to start the conversation.

Yes, you can try to converse with your racist relatives and make a plan to vote. But we all have the power to introduce change at our workplaces and with our clients, however gradual. There are better thought leaders than I who can speak to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which are crucial to any company’s transformation.

But what we can change are the questionable habits and assumptions from 20th century mass media audience growth and 21st century rapid scale tech adoption that keep us chasing our tails at our jobs.

At the intersection of content, media and technology, we’re in a unique position to ensure facts are correct, to maintain the complexity of nuanced stories, to prioritize long-term brand trust over short-term growth spurts, to behave responsibly with our audience’s data, and to build a more sustainable digital information economy.

If you want to build change into your 2021 planning, you should come equipped with high-quality data and conversation starters. Hopefully the following should help you start more meaningful conversations in your work, no matter where you are in your career.

1. In 2020, your audience changed. Do the research that indicates how and why they did.

We’re in the middle of a massive economic downturn and period of social change, but that can’t be the sole cause of every single decision a brand makes. “Well, people bought fewer widgets because of COVID” isn’t really a statement that holds much water in a report this year.

Instead, I encourage content and marketing analysts to look at hard data of how audiences have changed — and be aware of over-simplification when reporting on this year’s downturn. Question easy explanations and simple solutions for current business problems because they’re unlikely to hold long-term weight.

Here are some audience behaviors that changed, with some stats and suggestions to back them up.

• Audiences of all races and political affiliations changed in their opinions on how companies should address racism. As of August 31, 2020 55% of U.S. consumers expect companies to address the root causes of racism, acknowledge that racism is a problem, and make products accessible and suitable to all communities. If you’re being told that customers do not want to hear about racism or politics, please pad your planning decks with some stats from the excellent Edelman Trust Barometer report: The Fight for Racial Justice in America. You’ll find stats for both brands and media companies that indicate a majority of Americans support major change in how our institutions address racism.

  

  Take what you will from this graph, but I read that all information producers should really be highlight more social scientists and experts on how to address racism to increase trust in data.

• Audiences changed their digital behaviors: more screen time, but less patience for garbage. I’m unable to locate a good study on this, but this article reflects the conversations I’ve been having with my friends: we’re being far more intentional about how we interact with our devices and KonMari-ing our digital habits. We’re leaving Facebook for real this time, getting mute-happy on our keywords, filtering out digital garbage as we make time for real change.

  Most of us have spent far more time online this year than we have in the past, stressing about what we see, and our patience for poor user experience is thin. We have the time to research better solutions, better places to shop, more engaging conversations to have or new websites to read, if we’re going to spend time online. There’s no longer any missing out to fear.

  Unless it’s a big news day — like every Tuesday when I watch a local journalist live-tweet the Minneapolis Charter Commission meeting — the doomscroll is not worth the depression. Fluff content is for the Netflix or Twitch hours; if I have to stare at your shitty website and slow-loading ads, I want to be gaining some kind of new understanding of what I’m seeing.

  And I’m willing to bet that you’re seeing it as well. Check your metrics: How many people have unsubscribed from your marketing newsletters or social accounts this year? Can you see evidence that people are muting or blocking your content? Has time on page gone down on the clickbait articles you wrote “for SEO”? (If you’re seeing the opposite, then give a shout. I’m super curious.)

• Both privacy rules and expectations have rapidly accelerated change. With increased scrutiny of digital privacy in news media and the adoption of CCPA earlier this year, consumer expectations of privacy have shifted. Based on a Datagrail survey (which may be skewed cos they’re a pro-privacy brand but the methodology looks good), 68% of consumers expect to be able to opt-out of a company selling their data to a third party.

  We’ve spent more time online this year, so we’re increasingly more literate about how our data is used and sold. Consumers place the onus on brands for managing privacy, even when vendors make privacy practices opaque, so agencies and vendors need to lead the conversation with their clients.

2. Truth and transparency is better than “authenticity.”

“Authentic” content in the 2010s was just the same old advertising written with an air of chattiness, a bit of slang, the filtering out of any looks or phrases that were potentially ugly or off-brand. Authentic content is also cheap because for many, authentic means that you don’t need to really check facts. (I’m a blogger; I know how this works.)

With rampant misinformation across the internet and a general distrust in science, we need to ditch “authenticity” in favor of truthful, transparent and vulnerable. We’ve all learned too much this year about who and when we can trust when even the CDC is shifting its recommendations about the virus that has killed 200,000 people and has never really declined in the U.S. Many of us were shocked — or our worst suspicions were confirmed — with NPR’s recent report on how the oil industry deceived the public for decades on how much plastic was actually recycled.

For those of us who grew up with Joe Camel and are on the second or third recession of our careers, it’s natural to be suspicious of corporate and media storytelling. Many of us monitor the ingredients we eat, and in the information age, it’s not uncommon for audiences to monitor their media diets.

Audiences want to hear when you don’t know the answer, or why your answer may not be the whole story. Lay your cards and questions on the table, and you’ll create better conversations and deeper connections.

Even Google is concerned with truth signals, which are represented by links to other authoritative sources. Link out to truth, even if it means “driving traffic away.” Your audience — and Google — will be more likely to consider your content trustworthy. With Google under the antitrust and misinformation microscope, I’m sure they’re working on even better ways to determine truth signals with their algorithm.

I can tell you from experience that you’re not going to lose much traffic or any customers by including more links. (Disturbingly few people check those sources once they see that the links are there. Audiences are smart but not always thorough. Still, it only takes one whistleblower or SME to out a disingenuous claim.)

3. For your sanity, and your audience’s, shift to opt-in thinking.

Opt-in is a hard shift for all the TV-raised, spray-and-pray-minded marketers out there, but I think about it this way: in content, we’re in the business of educating and changing minds.

So when you’re planning, ask your clients and internal marketing teams:

• Do you like using the web right now? Do you like how it works?

• Do you like receiving email you didn’t sign up for?

• Do you like when your phone browser crashes because it’s loaded too much stuff?

• Do you like when autocorrect sends a message you didn’t intend to write?

• If you’ve told someone no, do you like it when they ask you again and again for a yes?

Sometimes the answer to these questions are: “No, but it works.” Hell, I’ve answered those questions with “No, but it works.” But I think about my daily digital frustrations: how could I have built a world that’s like getting smacked in the face with a coupon mailer every time I want to find a piece of information? How can I change this?

Sometimes I think about the marketing benchmarks I’ve worked with in the past: is under 1% really a good engagement or conversion rate? Yes, in comparison to other dated tactics, 1% might be brilliant. But also, that means you have a 99% opt-out rate. That means 99% of people have told you no. That’s not good.

To invest in opt-in marketing, we need to shift our focus to better interactions with a smaller scale, only using data that we own in secure databases, and being more transparent about finding our audience’s trust. How much money do we spend grasping at larger scale when we could be making better connections with the audiences we already have?

Hinging an entire marketing strategy on a bought email list, a tv ad or a display campaign just because it reaches a large amount of people — that’s broadcast thinking. And we’re in the process of shifting to a conversation ecosystem. (Conversation isn’t a comments section, btw. It’s telling a better story, listening to the response, and following up.)

Sometimes we call it “brand safety;” I like to think that we can shift to the age of consent. I’d recommend shifting away from $30k six-month minimum ad spends and shifting toward tactics like the following:

• Secure, owned, subscription-driven data that’s used to surface preferences but not block content (some notes on ethical personalization)

• Understanding how users interact with your email — and knowing that if you’re getting an open rate under 25%, maybe you’re due for a content and audience reckoning (some notes on better emails)

• Divest from annoyance or “attention economy” thinking. Intentionally audit every web experience your brand owns — either on your website or where your ads run — for potentially bothering genuine customers. (We need to chill with the pop-ups, notifications, and ad units. I can’t do this for another 40 years. I’m about to Ted Kaczynski every time I look at a news website and I love the web. I imagine your target audience is not too different.)

• Focusing on more direct ad buys with publishers whose information you trust — and auditing the experience to ensure they’re not sharing your audience’s information to sites whose facts you don’t trust. Content-based keyword blocking can hurt good publishers, so knowing that the sites where your ads run publish quality information is key.

• Invest in content that attracts audiences without deceiving them. Make tools they need and facts they can use.

4. Plan for content like we live now, not for how we used to live.

Many of you have likely scaled back on just about everything in the past year. You’ve reevaluated priorities and gotten rid of the unnecessary. Keep it up.

Instead, devote time and resources to getting it right. Instead of saying “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” start asking: are we setting high enough expectations for good?

I’m not advocating perfectionism; I’m in favor of a more considerate process that values conversation and multiple voices. Your definition of “good” should reflect a diverse audience and user base, a healthy, human audience experience, and a sustainable creative experience. (Some more thoughts on good web content here.)

Some conversation starters for in-house teams, vendors and clients that can shift the dialogue to advocate for your audience:

• What is the most important impression/perception our audiences should take from our brand in 2021? How can we honestly deliver that to them while making their lives easier?

• Where are the opportunities to make our content more accessible to wider audiences?

• Are the techniques we’re using potentially driving away good customers?

• Imagine our audience’s attention isn’t divided: how are they perceiving our content and our brand?

• Are we giving ourselves enough time to make this content trustworthy and reliable?

• Have we considered what this content might appear to our future audiences? Does this stand the test of time? (And if not, is it worth the effort right now?)

• Do we have the resources to contribute more transparently to public conversations around trusting science and fact?

• Do we publish regularly successful content? Or only the occasional hit? How can we ensure our content is more regularly successful without running ourselves ragged?

• Do we need all the data we’re gathering from our audience? And who has access to that data? What are we not using and how can we excise it?

• When we choose our KPIs or success metrics for next year, what metrics are we ignoring and why?

• Are we paying our creators enough to enable them to create their best work, i.e., researched, trustworthy and factual content?

• What are we sacrificing when we prioritize scale? Are we trying to game a system for quick growth when we could influence equity and perception more naturally? Are we protecting our audience’s best interests?

• Are we putting too much trust in platforms, technology and algorithms to surface and distribute our content? How can we do a better job of building a system to directly engage with our audience without over-advertising?

• If we showed our content plan to a mother working from home full-time with two elementary school-aged children who are distance learning, would she start weeping from frustration?

Remember that we are all in this together. Every company has good people and we are all doing our best. We can hold each other accountable with more conversation, more questions about assumptions, and a general deference and respect for people who may slow things down. We’re all very aware that we can’t continue like this.

Not every conversation will go well. Many vendors, stakeholders, and clients will be uncomfortable with feedback and conversation, insisting that we continue exactly as before, unable to imagine a different future or a different model. But diving into quality data (Edelman! Pew! calculating your own data!) will help back up your case.

Build in even more time for the slowdown. Trust your gut. Don’t subject your audience to anything you wouldn’t want your mother or your child to use. Pivot to high quality.

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Exceedingly engaging embeds for engineer-deprived teams: ExCo review

Without a devoted interactive developer and deep content resources, it’s difficult to make a website that’s much more than a brochure with a few links. And even when you have an interactive developer, it’s unlikely that they’re going to be jazzed about your super basic quiz requests every month.

In the past few years, a host of interactive content tools have flooded the market, with assorted capabilities and varying levels of sophistication. I’ve written about Ceros (high sophistication) and Typeform (low sophistication) before. Ex.Co, backed by Disney and used by Warner Brothers among others, is somewhere in the middle, with the ability to design, execute and test complex interactive content in a WYSIWYG interface.

Ex.Co at a glance

You should know: even though it’s cloud-based, Ex.Co has no auto-save function. Like desktop software, you have to hit a button to save your work. This would be a dealbreaker for me with most content creation tools (it’s 2020, and I would like auto-save with version control in my content SaaS please), but Ex.Co’s capabilities are robust enough to overcome its lack of auto-save.

With a variety of templates for quizzes, chats, social graphics, videos and more, Ex.Co provides an extremely intuitive interface for drag-and-drop style content. In the trial content Each Ex.Co subscription comes with:

• access to a library of Getty Images and videos (the sexiest stock photo vendor)

• A/B content testing

• analytics integrations with common vendors

• polling, video, quiz, and lead generation tools that can be compounded to make a single piece of content with multiple elements

• unlimited seats and unlimited number of interactive widgets published, so you can write quizzes til you drop under 30k pageviews

Content from Ex.Co is HTML5, so it’s embeddable and crawlable from search engines. It integrates with many common CRMs and segmentation vendors, so you can integrate the data you’re collecting with your other and use for some high-quality opt-in content personalization.*

The final product appears highly templated, so you’re not going to get wild with digital creativity here — but it’s functional, responsive and measurable.

Ex.Co isn’t priced for individual users, and it’s telling that most of its blue chip clients are legacy entertainment industry, but I’d recommend it for agencies and publishers that plan to produce multiple interactive items on a weekly basis.

*I’m not a huge fan of many of the ad tech vendors that Ex.Co integrates with, but as long as you keep your data in-house, secure, and relevant to your customer’s interests, I’m totally ok with this kind limited-use content personalization.

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Content tech links of the week

• Survey! The Write Life’s Alexis Grant is asking which content tools you use on a regular basis. I’ll link to the results once they’re published.

• Last week I wrote a whole essay about media trust and failed to link to the very good Pew data about how 51% of people do not understand how news companies produce stories.

• Cathy O’Neil breaks down how content recommendation algorithms like TikTok’s work in Bloomberg. It’s a technical explanation but absolutely accessible for a non-engineer.

• I dug this analysis of weird Spotify search spam at OneZero. It’s a little hard-headed on the entire practice of SEO, but the phenomenon of random noise tracks showing up for “relaxing music” is giggly. And for several years running, my most popular year-end track on Spotify was “3 hour white noise baby sleep” (great for *sigh* travel), so I guess I’ve fallen right into the noise vendors’ trap.

• I also enjoyed Markup’s analysis of surreptitious web trackers embedded into free tools like Disqus and AddThis. As I type this, Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds” is playing on my Spotify account, and the King reminds me: there’s no easy way out of the web data-mining industry.

• For the search nerds: an analysis of TikTok’s SEO strategy from RankScience.

• Writer, the company formerly known as Qordoba, published an excellent diversity, equity and inclusion glossary a little while back. If you want your company to be more inclusive than the Associated Press, check it out.

• And this is the only web thing that really made me laugh this week: Allie from Hyperbole and a Half published a chapter from her book.

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And no, the rant is not about The Social Dilemma, which I watched and yelled at. You can find plenty of good critique and send up this brilliantly obtuse statement from Tristan Harris, who gets far too much screentime in the doc.

Cultures in the U.S. and around the world still get upset when women ride bicycles, but if you never include women or history or general cultural awareness in your conversations, I guess you wouldn’t know that. Hilariously, VC tech money power dude Ben Evans tweeted about Harris’ statement, “Anyone can screw up.” Because gosh, isn’t it funny how these little misinformation “screw ups” from tech folks find their way into the public discourse and make a small sector of tech gents of money! Boys will be boys, after all.

(Do you ever think the money and the power goes to the wrong people?)

What I found most damaging was the metaphor for algorithms as three independent Vincent Kartheisers controlling your social media actions. In true tech industry fashion, it’s a depiction of algorithms as something much smarter than they actually are, with a power much greater than they actually have. “It’s not us, it’s the AI” is a misleading and disempowering argument.

The casting choice of Pete Campbell as a smug algo is pretty apt, tho.

Oh… yeah, so that’s not my actual rant today!

In this newsletter I prefer to write about how tech and media intersect, but today’s post is strictly about news ecosystems because in the misinformation economy, all systems of information production need to evaluate their assumptions, processes and operations. Also, before I started The Content Technologist and before I got into SEO, I was knee-deep in the Minnesota media ecosystem. So, our contents:

• On trusting journalism and media companies - with some tips that could honestly be applied to any information production operation in content marketing or tech development

• A review of audience research software Answer the Public

• Content tech links of the week

Now I sink into my identity as a true Minnesotan, one who can never stop talking about her (adopted) home state.

Journalism in its current form won’t save us either.

The Twin Cities has a thriving journalism and media ecosystem — but it fails the public repeatedly without much help from either big tech or big media.

We have all you could ask for in a media market: conservative billionaire-owned “mainstream” outlets; two local dailies; three Black-owned news organizations, two of which have been around for decades; Indigenous-run news organizations that serve both the urban native populations and those in reservations out-state; a leading journalism and communications university with a solid student newspaper; our own uniquely boring political news analysis tv show focused solely on Minnesota; business-only media; arts-only media; neighborhood-only media; socialist-leaning newspapers; jingoistic glossy magazines; a somewhat-alt weekly; that blog that took down Dan Rather back in the day; and the holy grail of it all: member-supported nonprofit journalism.

Ah, yes, Minnesota Public Radio! You know, the one that used to distribute the extremely nationally famous radio show about how goshdarn adorable smalltown American life can be with the oh-so-charming host who was rightfully fired after years of sexually harassing his women employees. Aside from that folksy now-cancelled show, MPR has a long and somewhat troublesome history in the state — ask anyone involved in public radio, and it’s likely they’ve reluctantly accepted MPR’s dominance as a necessary evil. As with many media companies, good people work there, but they don’t always have good things to say about the company.

A part of American Public Media Group (AMPG), MPR operates a news outlet and two music stations, one devoted to classical, and the other to the adult contemporary continuum of Prince-Father John Misty. DJs at MPR are household names in the Twin Cities, and all three stations have a solid reputation for, well, public radio. You know.

I like MPR because it has fewer ads and because, to some extent, it creates community through events devoted to civic education. But the underwriters are still the mining industry, the donors are still the wealthy, and the attitude is still pro-business versus pro-audience. In the past I supported MPRNews when the Republican billionaire-owned newspaper regularly published racist reporting and editorials. (FYI the newspaper still publishes racist reporting and editorials, but they have some good reporters at the moment, so I’m still tentatively subscribed. Trust me, I reconsider my subscription every day.) But my sustaining membership for the nonprofit MPR has fallen by the wayside, and I have minimal interest in renewing for a number of reasons.

The latest in a history of MPR bad decisions

Last week, Garrett McQueen, the only Black DJ on the classical station was fired, purportedly for not following standard procedure in adding Black composers to the playlist. This week, we have this kerfuffle with celebrated reporter Marianne Combs. Click through to read the whole tweet thread.

You can also read an MPR editor’s response here.

To quote Baby Herman in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the whole thing stinks like yesterday’s diapers. The subject of Combs’ reporting, a relatively minor overnight DJ most of us hadn’t heard of, has since been summarily removed from his position after public statements from most of the DJs at The Current.

It’s blowing over like the west coast wildfire smoke that’s clouding our midwestern skies. What scares me is the idea that an award-winning journalist like Combs chose to leave — in what’s obviously not the first challenge she’s ever felt in the newsroom. And based on MPR president Duchesne Drew’s response, she was challenged extremely dated editorial ideas that don’t benefit the public they serve.

In over a decade of studying both local and national media, both professionally and as an enlightened voyeur, I’ve heard the promise of member-supported nonprofit media held high like Simba, a catch-all remedy for journalism’s decline. Recently the folks who think 501(c)3s will save us are louder than they’ve been in about a decade, and to them I say: my dudes, please look at Minnesota.

Nonprofit journalism and multiple news options don’t create change or accountability.

We have so many nonprofits in MN. Not just media nonprofits, but massive foundations, arts funds, fellowships galore. Charity bleeds out our ears. We are drowning in news options.

But nonprofits — media or otherwise — are slow and difficult to change. Despite the massive amounts of charity and wealth of media to choose from, we still live in one of the racially segregated states in the union. George Floyd, Philando Castile, and Jamar Clark were all murdered here, and the largest media organizations are still calling for law and order. Our largest newspaper regularly runs pro-Trump stories with minimal fact-checking, and even the publicly supported news stations fall prey to both sides-ism and outdated ideas of what’s newsworthy. The billionaire-supported and white-run foundations provide next to no help for our ailing neighbors. Money grows moldy in endowments while the rich decamp to their second homes and our neighbors live in tents in public parks while a brutal winter is very much on its way.*

For workers, nonprofit media orgs have the reputation for being every bit as awful as other news media organizations. Layoffs, sexual harassment, blatant racism, you name it: both nonprofit and for-profit local media are dripping with stories of abuse. The open secrets of bad behavior are shared in happy hours, morning coffees, bathroom sob sessions, but as long as the same (wealthy, white) people are in power, nothing changes.

As long as news media companies adhere to the same “journalistic standards” defined by rich white men decades ago, nothing changes. When the systems that produce what are supposed to be “quality” news and journalism harbor abusers, serve the interests of business underwriters, and make decisions they believe will placate rich donors, it’s extremely hard to trust the media we see. We’re still stuck with journalism that is pro-oligarchy and anti-democracy, whether it’s for- or nonprofit.

* Still on this soapbox. Donate to the Minneapolis Sanctuary Movement’s mutual aid initiatives through Zacah.

Journalists need to hold their industry accountable.

I’m just as concerned as everyone else about our environment of misinformation, but the lack of trust in journalism is truly on the media itself to fix. People turn to independent news or social media when they don’t trust what they see in the mainstream, when their voices are distorted or dismissed, and when their media doesn’t reflect the world they live in.

Although social media makes it much easier for political bad actors to flood social media with questionable content, upcoming big tech antitrust or pro-privacy regulations aren’t going to solve legacy news media’s longstanding reputation of discrimination, marginalization and just plain abusive behavior toward its audience.

I understand that journalists feel they are under attack, and they’re not wrong. Reporters and editors have extremely hard jobs, exacerbated by the 24-hour news cycle, trolls yelling from all sides, and the need to get facts correct. But when journalists claim “free press is under attack” and then insist that there are two sides to Black Lives Matter, or that unreported sexual abuse isn’t newsworthy, that peaceful protests aren’t worth coverage, or that their entry-level employees can’t earn a living wage, it’s really hard to give the American mainstream news unwavering support.

How the news shifts the narrative away from itself.

Despite journalism’s professed commitment to objectivity and truth, American media rewards hyperbole, quick facts with no context, good guys and bad guys. Both journalists and advertisers alike talk in the language of efficient narrative storytelling, which cuts out externalities, deep research, and, most often, data and science. Although journalists understand complex and nuanced storytelling, old media formats like local evening news or newspapers fail to provide the detail that can be included and expanded in the digital formats that their audiences use most often.

In recent reporting on protests and civic actions following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, it’s rare to see either for-profit or nonprofit news outlets acknowledge the massive amounts of data on systemic racism. Instead we see incomplete reporting on even the idea of police abolition in favor of stories like “suburban visitors won’t go downtown.” (To be fair here, reporters at several local news outlets have done a good job at combing the local police data and discovering gross inequities and misconduct.)

In the treatment of COVID-19, our local news media companies continue to publish the important dailies of our case numbers and deaths. But they also happily jumped back on the “reopen businesses” bandwagon the second the option was available, and very few accompany stories of indoor dining with disclaimers about how eating at a restaurant is really inadvisable. Reporting in the public interest would support keeping the population healthy, not keeping businesses open.

News publishers shout loudly about a loss of ad revenues at the hands of digital vendors while profiting from programmatic media networks that use a disturbing amount of your data, including credit card and other personally identifying information. Did you know that many local news publishers sell “reach” to their advertisers using the same ad tech networks that low-quality misinformation and conspiracy sites use? Sure, it’s anonymized, but if you’re going to take Facebook to task for a lack of privacy and spreading bad info, local news orgs: look at the shit on your own shoes.

On top of it all, there’s the disdain for the people who are actively engaging with journalists. In both working in media and munching popcorn while watching editor gripe-fests on Twitter, I see all levels of media workers— editors, reporters and publishers— complaining that the public doesn’t understand their work, sometimes to the point of mocking their audience. “Media literacy is bad and has to be fixed,” they say, and then do nothing to fix it because hey! At least their engagement numbers are up.

What should journalism do to save itself? Some suggestions.

Whether billionaire-owned, non-profit, or member-based, the business and practice of journalism needs to enhance its own accountability and transparency — without blaming digital competitors or politicians or whatever. Here are some ideas, with varying levels of complexity and bakedness:

• Radically improve transparency, beginning with publicly posting editorial standards and processes on news organization websites. Write in plain language how ethics codes make their way into reporting processes and provide specific examples of how they are used. Update those examples on a quarterly basis.

  Take the grand statements about “conflict of interest,” “fairness,” and “balance,” and break them down into how they might be incorporated into a reported story. I don’t know why news organizations don’t do this, but maybe they feel grand statements of intent are more important than details of how processes actually work.

  Journalism isn’t a trade secret, but the media industry seems to be operating on the assumption that everyone knows how reporters work because Bob Woodward is still somehow around. Y’all, even my smartest friends don’t know the difference between background and on-the-record unless they work in comms. Most journalists don’t know how journalism works until they get their first journalism job, which is a damn shame.

• One of the major shifts in our society’s discourse is moving from the default white, wealthy, male “objective” to acknowledging that lived experiences contribute to biases across the board, and these biases show up in everything from our treatment of coworkers to our use of “standard” English.

  Journalism-driven organizations need to acknowledge that all reporters are biased, that there is no universal standard for objectivity, and that unnecessarily rapid production cycles exacerbate those biases. Beginning an ethics code with “we are unbiased in our reporting” is not appropriate for our current information ecosystem. Everyone, everything is biased from our lived experiences, and sometimes that lived knowledge enhances a story.

• Provide education around personal biases and retire outdated “best practices.” Ensure that all newsroom employees and leadership receive ongoing education and discuss regularly, even when the most HR-averse motherfucker in the room complains about wasted time.

  Acknowledge that newsrooms need to change, from the most grizzled newsroom vet to the newest intern. All employees, whether long-term or interns, should be held to the same standards of transparency and bias acknowledgement.

• Ensure that codes of ethics are reviewed and enforced by a diverse group of journalists.

• Publicly display news org diversity data, including that of leadership.

• Conduct regular surveys of public trust in news coverage and oversample underrepresented communities until that trust is improved.

• Document and link to all sources where available upon publication, along with publishing reporting processes and questions when available because we have unlimited space on the web and that sort of transparency is literally what the internet is for.

  Document the questions asked, the research done, the previous news stories that led to this one, the press releases received, the full transcripts of interviews for on-the-record subjects. (IMO, software should be developed for exactly this purpose. We don’t need more software in general, but this tool we need! The only citation software out there is designed for academics, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to create similar versions for reporting.)

• Provide sources with context about reporting processes before the interview is completed. A customized boilerplate for how the reporting process works is fine, but make sure that sources understand how their words will be used. Each individual reporter is different, but all follow distinct processes. Your sources should know yours.

• Treat sources as audience members — with respect, dignity, and acknowledgement of the complexity of their lives — while still asking tough questions. Many amazing reporters already do this, but just as many act as if they are owed an interview or a response. (Sooooo many entitled, unnecessarily prickly reporters out there. If you’re scoffing at this suggestion, that’s probably you.)

• Ensure leadership in both editorial and publishing is actually diverse — and give up power when it is not. (I assure you, giving up power will make you feel better in the long run.)

• Shift from examining the abuses of individual people in power to larger systems. The past four years have taught us that individual people in power are rarely held accountable, even with all the good journalism in the world. We need to interrogate the values woven into our lives, not individual bad actors.

• Invest in radically different business practices that develop audience trust, rather than more programmatic display networks that rely on poor data and destroy the integrity of content around it. Stop thinking of your audience as eyeballs. (I realize this is loaded but we have to imagine something else because legacy media websites are universally a pile of garbage.)

• Don’t refer to readers as “customers.” Ever. I know everyone complains about “users,” but “customers” indicates a transactional relationship that does not serve the public good.

• Clarify the difference between opinion and reporting. Fact-check opinion pieces. (And justify why an opinion piece is running if it seems contrarian.)

• Believe underrepresented groups. Examine data about racism, sexism, and homophobia and include it in every story that addresses racism, sexism, LGBTQIA rights and sexual violence.

• Believe science and report on the realities of how scientific research works in a similar fashion. Scientific research is almost always toward an answer, not a definitive answer in itself. It needs to be presented in context with other research.

• Realize that white rural and suburban people are not actually an underrepresented population.

• Stop drooling over runaway business success, and do the work to create deeper narratives that illustrate trends in the public interest. (At the same time: if you’re going to write about either the evils or the benefits of technology, try to understand how the tech works and its actual capabilities before you praise or deride it.)

• Never ever ever say “we’ve seen this before” as a reason for dismissing a recurring or ongoing story. Just because a local issue is not breaking doesn’t mean it’s not broken.

• Stop publishing opinion columns or interviews or journalism about abusers and racists who have lost their platforms! There are so many other people out there with valid, high-quality opinions who haven’t repeatedly abused and dehumanized others. And there are plenty of abusers and racists who still have platforms to provide that perspective!

Audience, send your financial support elsewhere!

Here are a handful Minnesota media organizations (presented alphabetically) doing good work that you can support if you are interested:

• The Circle News

• Insight News

• The Minnesota Reformer

• Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder

• MinnPost

• Sahan Journal

• Trilloquy, Garret McQueen’s podcast

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Auto-complete data in context: Answer the Public review

Digital content research is a legit hydra, with a never-ending supply of keywords and ideas and queries from different sources, all positioning to be the best fountain of ideas for your content calendar. It’s hard to know where to start and when to stop during the research process, with new ideas and new software surfacing endless amounts of user queries that could be used.

For the past few years, one of the most popular sources of keyword data has been tools that scrape Google’s auto-complete suggestions. I’ve always found these marginally helpful. The auto-complete algorithm’s dependence on existing datasets and location biases means it’s simply not as helpful (or as accurate) when compared to either keyword planner/Ads API data.

But Answer the Public mitigates some of those tensions by organizing, contextualizing and storing that auto-complete data, which makes it the first auto-complete scraper I recommend for as part of a content research program.

Answer the Public at a glance

Answer the Public is a freemium content research tool that generates auto-complete terms, organized by question signifiers and then by alphabetical. The free version lets you search on two queries per day, which can be exported and analyzed with your own tools. But the paid version is far more valuable, allowing users to save and compare auto-complete results over time and over geographies.

Using it is simple: Type in a one- or two-word search query, select a country, and receive a host of ideas and questions about that query based on recent searches.

More important than the tool’s direct function, Answer the Public provides educational materials on how to use the data and what it means in context. Moz is the only other keyword research tool that invests that deeply into educating its users about what the data means and why they should use keyword data.

My only two problems with the tool:

• The creepy dude in the background video who watches as you type. It’s an apt metaphor for the surveillance economy, but it’s legit disconcerting.

• The name of the tool. “Answer the Public” implies that the data is some kind of noble town hall when it’s the same Google data every other autocomplete scraper uses. The data is not from the public; it’s the Google user. “Answer the Searcher” would be a better name.

As with all keyword research tools, Answer the Public should be used with other tools to triangulate insights and identify trends. (I run all the queries I get from ATP through SEMRush’s Keyword Magic to determine popularity and search volume.) But it’s a good start for content research and a worthwhile addition to your tool stack.

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Content tech links of the week

• Missed this back when it was released in July, but Pew found that Americans who get their news primarily from social media are not as informed as most other sources (except local tv news). Those who are the most informed get their information from news websites and apps.

• I’m a big fan of algorithmic transparency initiatives. I guess New Zealand is as well, via OneZero.

• Many companies —tech and otherwise— released statements in support of Black Lives Matter, but their statements of good intention don’t relieve the underlying causes of tech racism, in MIT Technology Review

• The Facebook whistleblower memo write-up from Buzzfeed is enlightening because it explains internal non-processes that identifying political bad actors on the platform.

• Study Hall (light paywall) published some reviews of different news outlets’ content management systems, and it is hilarious. That WaPo uses a separate CMS for print and digital is telling for Bezos’ priorities (esp since I think WaPo will be primarily a software company in ten years).

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Today I’m also considering how, for 18 years, I considered 9/11 to be the defining trauma of my life and naively thought that I’d never be in close proximity to such major disaster again, that the world would mostly right itself. As an 18-year-old freshman at NYU in 2001, I was in my dorm two miles away, and I remember applying eyeshadow for my 8am class when I heard the low-flying planes and all the sounds that followed.

Ultimately I was fine, and my friends were fine, and my memory from the time is just that I didn’t want more people to die needlessly. But they did, in decades-long wars that were supposedly for our protection. In the years afterward I danced to record labels and bands and songs called “death from above” as the PATRIOT Act eroded our rights, presumably in retaliation from this horrific crime that could only ever be committed by a foreign power.

Now nearly 200,000 are dead because the U.S. doesn’t actually believe in security and safety (except for the rich and white, in that order), and we measure the days in how many 9/11’s worth of people have died. Those low-flying aircraft showed up in my Midwest city neighborhood, this time flown by surveilling locals instead of foreign terrorists, but still hell-bent on control through destruction. Although it was triggering to my personal trauma — I am not calm when I hear low-flying aircraft — I am technically “fine” and I still do not want any more people to die needlessly, but the people I am most concerned about are those living in our city parks and those protesting our local, state and federal government, not in wars abroad. Never fucking forget.

Anyway, contemplation of lifetime trauma and the current global crisis aside, I’m working on original research that I’d like to share today. So, contents:

• Light insights from an in-progress search data research project

• A review of freemium data visualization software Flourish

• Links of the week

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How do U.S. searchers think that tech algorithms work?

Plenty of other newsletters cover the U.S. debate over Big Tech regulation, so I stay away from writing about those hearings and takes. (To be honest, I don’t really care who owns TikTok, but it would be hilarious if it were Oracle, which is like the Russell Crowe of enterprise software.) But I watch them closely because they’re a fantastic way to learn how the public conceives technology and content recommendation algorithms.

Compared with the general public’s knowledge of how journalism works — not great! — our collective understanding of algorithms is exponentially lower. Since Big Tech feels no need to educate users about their complex products in the name of intellectual property, most people instead believe what academics would consider a folk theory of algorithms. Technically, what I discuss in this newsletter are educated folk theories. The SEO industry comprises educated folk theories, since no SEO experts actually work at Google and all current and former Googlers who understand the algorithm are under NDAs.

One of these folk theories may be the centerpiece of a forthcoming antitrust suit against Google, at least according to the NYT: the widely believed notion that tech companies discriminate against conservative media and voices. According to Pew, a majority of Americans believe that social media companies censor certain points of view. The study doesn’t explore whether people feel this discrimination is directly manipulated by humans or algorithmic.

Like all folk theories of tech, these theories of algorithmic censorship are not entirely wrong, but they’re often off-base. They’re on the outer part of the dartboard where the numbers are but technically corked in on the same board as the bull’s-eye. (The theories in this newsletter are outer bull’s-eye, according to me.)

To understand the reach of these and other folk algorithm theories, as well as to test out a few tools, I pulled some search data to explore the public’s conception of our algorithmic networks.

Why search query data?

Search query data records the exact words that a person types into a search bar. Google and other search engines record and aggregate these terms primarily for advertising, but SEO and content strategists use it as well. The data is completely anonymized — never publicly associated with who typed it. Some search queries aren used tens of thousands of times per month, and others are completely unique.

It’s also wildly revealing, providing in-depth insights on what and how we ask Google about what we don’t know. More than any other type of digital data, search queries reveal what makes us curious at a massive scale. Even though Google’s search share is likely declining as more options become available, most of us still search on a daily basis, across all walks of life. Close-reading the most popular queries can provide an accurate assessment of how the public considers a certain topic.

For this dataset I pulled, cleaned, consolidated and organized about 6,000 queries representing 264k monthly U.S. searches using the following tools:

• SEMRush

• Answer the Public (review next week)

• Tableau Prep (yep I’ll probably review this too)

• Flourish (review below!)

I pulled queries around Google and all major social networks related to the terms “x algorithm,” “x bias,” and “how x works.” I also used the head term “shadowban” in general to see which networks were discussed because I was curious about who uses the word (which I learned from a Stephen Malkmus song) in general.

I’m not going deep into my methodology here because it’s not an academic paper! — but if you’d like more detail on how to organize and pull keyword data, how long it takes, how accurate it is, I’m happy to chat.

Additional caveats: This is part of a larger data project that I’m working on. So this is neither the full nor the only dataset. Mostly it started as a curiosity: how do users think that content recommendation algorithms work? How do they think algorithms are being controlled? How much do they use the search engine they don’t trust to discover whether the search engine is biased?

A few early insights from this work-in-progress dataset:

1. Different channels reveal different levels of sophistication around algorithmic knowledge.

• Instagram users are most likely to talk directly about how the algorithm works, with TikTok users asking more general mechanics questions like “how do I get more likes on TikTok” that don’t directly mention the algorithm.

• Google users no longer search for “how google works.” Users who want to learn more about Google algorithms generally structure those queries around the algorithm or other queries.

• For the amount of Facebook users, there’s surprisingly little search volume, compared to its sister at Instagram.

• No one asks about the Pinterest algorithm, to a comical degree.

2. Instagram users notice (and panic) when there is an algorithmic change.

Sudden drops in any metrics or visuals prompt queries like “new instagram rule” (6,600 searches/month) and “whats going on with Instagram” (1,000 searches/month). Both Insta and TikTok creator/creative audiences are invested in understanding how those algorithms work and why they are changing.

Compare this withYouTube’s massive creator/creative base, which doesn’t seem to search that much on Google. (FYI, Google’s and YouTube search engines are completely different algorithms and products, so it’s likely that there are more searches on YouTube itself about the same issues and many of these queries.)

3. If a majority of Americans believe that Facebook and Google/YouTube have bias or censor some opinions over others, they aren’t searching for more information about why or how that might be.

These search volume wonders are fairly low, compared to other verticals of search queries, and compared to the majority of Americans in Pew’s study. If every query in my study was searched only once by a unique person (not likely), only .8% of Americans would be represented in my dataset.

I trust Pew’s data — and I need to do some more explorations specifically around the word “censor” — so how do we turn concepts of algorithmic and tech bias from a broadcast to a conversation? How do we create trust in our existing social platforms or any other emerging media when we’re starting from a point of both misinformation and mistrust?

And finally, the data itself…

Below is the keyword data, visualized by Flourish, but I’d recommend that you click through to the interactive versions, with five different viz options (and one more artistic interpretation) of the same data. Circles are to scale, so bigger circles indicate more search interest around a specific keyword.

The data kindof makes sense as a static graphic. You can see the more-than/less-than. But in the interactive version, you can hover to understand the totals scale, click into each of the circles to see individual search queries, duplicate and manipulate for yourself, and even check out the raw data if you want to do your own analysis.

And if you’d like this kind of topic research and analysis for your business or content strategy — or if you’d like me to help your team develop a similar data-driven content research process — please reach out. I’m happy to chat.

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Flourish: Interactive data visualization for when Excel is too limiting

Digital data is hella complex, even when you’re doing a simple count and close-reading. Data is also often displayed in a way that’s not easy to understand, and we’re still getting a handle on the best kind of data visualization for the general public to understand.

The whole success of the digital economy relies on data to be three dimensional, multifaceted, worthy of exploration, especially when you’re not trying to answer a yes or no question. Static PowerPoint slides or marginally deeper Excel sheets may do the trick occasionally, but for the most part static graphs cut out the complexity and drive “more than” or “less than” decision-making. Tableau powers through massive amounts of data and is very slick, but it’s an enterprise-level expense and requires a power user to drive.

I’ve been searching for a middle lane for ages and I think I may have found it: The freemium data visualization tool Flourish offers a solution for independent data visualizers and enterprise teams alike.

Flourish at a glance

Flourish’s functionality isn’t unlike PowerPoint or Excel charts. Choose your template, and then upload data to make a chart. Export a static image or HTML file, or embed the chart as needed.

I used the public version of Flourish for this trial, which was functional but very slow at processing and visualizing the data. I’m sure when you click through you’ll experience a similar slow speed; the tool is processing and visualizing a lot and data takes a while. When I eventually subscribe, I’m hoping it’s a little faster.

Once the data is uploaded, you can select the columns you want to analyze in your preferred order. It’s far easier than selecting columns in Excel or Tableau.

I also recommend preparing the data ahead of time, rather than fixing errors in the tool. And Flourish is case sensitive (Microsoft products are not as a default), so make sure your groupings are properly labeled.

Flourish offers a business-level version that some blue-chip clients like Google use. In the enterprise version, developers can upload their own viz templates: a super cool feature. I also imagine there are more collaborative elements to the enterprise version as well.

But I recommend Flourish highly, especially for semantic/text-based research projects like this one— I’ve been looking for ages for a better visualization of semantic and keyword research than a pivot table and finally I’ve found my dance partner.

A minor correction: Last week’s review graphic stated that Authory was “free.” It’s not free; it’s $10/month.

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Content tech links of the week

• The chum bucket vendors Taboola and Outbrain are not merging, via TechCrunch.

• Did you see the GPT-3 generated article in The Guardian?

• If you did, you should read why it’s overhyped, via TheNextWeb.

• Many of us are often rightfully pissed about inaccurate and deceptive phrases in reporting, like “racially motivated” or “officer-involved shooting.” Here’s a good guide to why those phrases should be retired and some suggestions to fix them.

• And I don’t like to link to research I haven’t read, but if you haven’t seen the report on amending Section 230, it’s on my docket and I’m sure we’ll be discussing here soon.

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In this week’s issue:

• What makes good content in 2020? It’s not just the entity.

• A review of writer portfolio tool Authory

• Content tech links of the week

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The content intelligence conundrum: We don’t have to wait for an algorithm update to change up SEO strategies

I was hired for my first solely SEO-focused position in 2013, right after Google’s Hummingbird update and just as Google Analytics reduced the amount of organic keyword data to a mere trickle. Hummingbird was the first to incorporate natural language processing into search results, so SEO tactics like keyword stuffing were rendered completely useless.

The Hummingbird update meant that my SEO job wouldn’t be just ramming keywords into places where they didn’t fit, and I was grateful that I had missed the years when content had taken a back seat to algorithmic ranking factors. Hummingbird shook search results up for those who had stuffed their sites with spammy, repetitive content and made room for those with broader vocabularies, more facts and more depth of information on a broad variety of topics.

Much like other major Google algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin, Hummingbird shook up how SEO agencies did business. They started hiring more content specialists like yours truly to create topic-driven editorial plans and focusing less on random link-building or keyword stuffing.

Most of Google’s content-focused algorithm updates since Hummingbird have been pretty lackluster and just tweak the natural language processing to a finer and finer degree. As much as SEO blogs freak out to a comical extent over algorithm updates, Google updates don’t ruffle the feathers of SEO professionals or major brands in 2020 because algorithm updates aren’t a big deal if you have a functioning, high-quality website and a long-term visibility strategy. Even though Google has adopted significantly more machine learning on its back end with RankBrain et al, the types of websites that show up in organic search results are more or less the same as they were after Hummingbird.

The Hubspot strategy: Still treading water in 2020

Because content search optimization best practices have not changed radically since 2013, most SEO-first agencies are executing exactly the same tactics that they were seven years ago.* SEO-focused content strategists have gotten comfortable with the framework of Content pillars > Mid-quality blog content > Incrementally improved traffic. It’s the Hubspot or “content hub” blog strategy, and it still works, sort of, if you’re comfortable with shoving all your content into a blog. But it’s also what literally every other business is doing online.

I’m not saying these tactics are bad or ineffective. Many businesses are still figuring out the role of organic content and traffic in their marketing, especially as consumer tastes have shifted drastically, so a reliable stream of traffic from search is a nice safety net. Too many websites have fields of broken links, redirect chains and other broken pieces that need SEO cleanup. Optimizing titles and headers works, as does adding in well-placed calls to action and structured content markup where relevant. Many, many little optimization points can be tweaked with attention, improving website performance incrementally over time.

Similarly, websites as a whole haven’t changed much since the advent of responsive design and mobile-first thinking. Marketing agencies crank out websites with the same basic templates, cramming all content into a blog or mimicking the no-whitespace-left-unclaimed design of newspaper websites.

The assumption remains: as long as we keep publishing lots of content that performs ok in comparison to the other content on the web, we don’t have to spend as much time thinking about where that content comes from, or how our users feel about that content.

But in addition to the incremental traffic gains and the leads generated, our web content — whether from a brand or a blog or a lifestyle publication — is taking on the characteristics of a permanent digital resource. Instead of simply competing with similar companies to get the best search result, why aren’t we creating more original, trustworthy resources for our businesses as a whole?

I’d challenge content and SEO teams to raise the bar on Good Content again, without an algorithm update, moving beyond talking about eyeballs or conversions, but in publishing and defining information for a larger audience. In the age of rampant misinformation, how can we contribute to a more informed web and create better content resources at the same time?

The state of organic search results in 2020

I haven’t been shy about my frustration with most search results lately. On Google’s side, the algorithm seems to be reducing my more complex queries to basics, subbing in a less specific synonym when I chose a specific word with its own connotation for a reason. When I search, I receive results that are many years old, when most of the time I’d like the most relevant results from the most expert source.

But my most recent aggravation: either when researching a vertical for a client, searching for new software, or just looking up recipes or home topics, Google results are a giant pile of sameness. Every organic search result reads like the same marketing brochure, reiterating the same half-facts, the same pile of words with very little original information.

If you’re outside the SEO industry, you may respond with an answer like “bots are writing the content,” but it’s highly unlikely computers are generating highly ranking content. Or you may dismiss the entire practice of SEO as snake oil or lacking in value because all the search results sound exactly the same, and that’s your jam (but read this first before you dump SEO entirely!).

As I’ve written before, SEO is still viable and search remains a phenomenal innovation, even when the quality of search results is slightly lower than it was around 2016-17. I have a theory that, in the transition from optimizing for individual keywords to optimizing for topics or entities, our obsession with more-content-on-every-topic-quick-now is leading to more mediocre search results. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

Check out the example of results for “best puppies that don’t shed.”* You’ll notice a striking similarity in all of the results. Every result is more or less the same: a list of photos (or, ugh, a clickthrough slideshow), with a short paragraph about each dog. Each page of content is different from the others, but reading through, you’ll notice a striking amount of sameness in content and design.

*This is an example query and not a personal one. I am a cat person.

All of these pages have been optimized to the fullest extent, based on keyword research and the language that audiences use. Each is full of facts that, if I were to independently verify, are presumably true. They use words specific to the entities “dogs” and “hypoallergenic.” Each page is technically original.

So why the stunning amount of sameness in vocabulary and sentence structure?

Because we’re relying too heavily on pillar-based optimization and not enough on originality and sourcing. It’s the same problem that we had with keyword-specific over-optimization, only now we’re replacing each keyword with its synonyms and related phrases.

What is the impact of entity optimization and content intelligence software?

In previous newsletters, I’ve reviewed content intelligence software, which compiles common keywords around the topic you wish to write about. Content intelligence software crawls top search results and surfaces the most common phrases among all pages that rank for a keyword, using algorithms like TF-IDF to sort the common phrases from the uncommon ones. So, for “hypoallergenic dogs,” you’ll get related phrases like

• Chinese crested

• Bichon frise

• shiny coat

• no shedding

These lists of keywords are compiled in briefs and sent to writers, who are then told “use all of these at least once.” Some SEO content optimization software tracks and scores similar keyword usage as you write. So, if you haven’t used the phrase “pet hair” in the “hypoallergenic dogs” article, you’ll be encouraged to do so.

I’m a huge fan of content intelligence software and absolutely think it’s worth the investment, especially if your writers are struggling with SEO. But content intelligence software only identifies similar your content is to other search results — and not how unique it is unto itself.

One reason web content sounds the same is that both content intelligence tools and writers are using the exact same source material: the top 10-20 existing search results. For many SEO bloggers, “I did my research” means that you’ve just looked at the top five search results, maybe added 1-2 more questions or words or a different structure, and then just rewritten the damn thing. (Don’t feel bad about it; I have executed this exact same process many times too.) It’s not plagiarism but it’s not exactly original. The ideas are all the same, top to bottom. It’s as if we’re drawing from the exact same well — which also happens to be the well that machine-generated content is drawing from. It’s a giant echo factory with low-quality information, and it’s contributing in its own little way to the misinformation epidemic.

Google has always warned against duplicate content, acknowledging that you can’t just dupe pages on a website and expect them to rank twice (a very old SEO trick that has been deprecated since the early aughts). But many SEO folks have always taken that to mean “duplicate content on your own website” and not “the exact same words and ideas as every other piece of content about the same subject on every other website.”

Defining “good content” in the misinformation age

Even the most talented writer churning out a blog post in a few hours on a topic is not going to be able to provide perspective on a topic they barely know. And a content intelligence algorithm can only tell you how alike one piece of content is to another piece of content.

(Another reminder: even if you get a “good score” in a piece of optimization software, you have only optimized content for that software’s best guess at what Google thinks is valuable and not Google’s algorithm or user needs. Even the most complex metrics and scores are directional, not absolute.)

The “good content” we all strive for is not just an echo of other search results. Good content takes a truly unique approach to a subject while still using the common words and phrases about that topic.

Good content in 2020:

• Is readable and crawlable by search engines

• Is well structured according to user behavior and topic matter (i.e., not buried in a blog somewhere)

• Contains words and phrases that are characteristic entity you are trying to rank for (i.e., “Chinese crested”)

• Also contains words, phrases, and syntax not seen in other similar search results for the query

• Presents the topic so that your target audiences can understand, with web-friendly writing

• Is factual and originally sourced, with citations

• Uses original photos, illustration, design, audio and videos to enhance and complement content

• Is accessible for different types of learners — ideally so readers, visual thinkers and video fans can understand the resource at hand

How to optimize content for originality

Admittedly, I haven’t yet done much new research into whether content originality is actually officially a ranking factor that Google uses in its algorithm, but SEO thought leaders are often so mired in nuts-n-bolts algo updates and drooling over the possibilities of machine-learning to talk about originality with the content they’re already creating. But I can tell you based on experience: well-optimized, originally presented content with cited, trustworthy sources always ranks highly when part of an SEO/UX-focused content strategy.

It’s a Chinese crested, of course.

Both Google and users prefer content that looks different from other search results! We can make the web look different, less spammy, by pushing in new directions.

Publishers and content marketers — and SEO software aimed at the two— need to invest in sourcing and originality as part of a high-quality content strategy. This includes:

• Fewer, but far higher quality content pieces published each month

• Original interviews with subject matter experts

• Clear citations and links to original sources where applicable

• Comprehensive, longer content that covers (or links to) deep resources for those who want to learn more

• Original photos or illustrations (created specifically for your website, i.e., not stock)

• Original video with closed captions included

• Original data (and not just repeating stats from other sources)

• New ideas or perspectives related to a specific topic that haven’t necessarily been represented before in search or magazines or tv (i.e., what your brain is for!

If you’re representing a brand: When selecting SEO providers and writers, brands should ask about how content is sourced and how originality is maintained. Well-researched, original content content takes more time, and you’ll likely be paying more to create less content. Your stakeholders may say, “Well I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And you’ll say, “Yes, that’s how you show up better in search results, attract audiences, and build a brand.”

If you’re an editor or content manager: you will likely need to build in more rounds of revisions. You’ll likely challenge your writers with your demands for originality. You may use phrases like, “Yes, but what’s your idea here?” And you will feel like Don Draper but also a bit like a jerk but also — you’ll find that the outcomes are better on all accounts. (But please do this responsibly and build in time for revisions if you’re going to tell someone to rethink their ideas. It can definitely be a bit of a gut punch if someone criticizes your core idea, so, you know, be kind, respectful and constructive.)

If you already create content that is both original and SEO-optimized: talk more about your research process and your sourcing, and point out how originality could help your client score new wins in organic search.

If you build SEO or content intelligence software: figure out how to include uniqueness, originality and sourcing in your quality assessment algorithms.

In the coming years, the tech industry will try to make AI-generated content happen. For those of us who believe that computers will never have original ideas, and that the ideas we weave into our writing are valuable, we need to optimize our critical thinking muscles a little more adeptly, especially in the content we create.

And in the meantime, let’s focus on making the best content possible with high quality, original information, so we can make the best search results possible.

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Collecting your digital clippings: Authory review

This week another large Minneapolis-based arts publication, The Walker Reader, is being either retired or reimagined. As the arts publication for the Walker Art Center, the Walker Reader happens to be one of the only publications where I was ever paid as a freelance writer, and my short article about a Kickstarter event remains on the website, hanging out until the next content audit comes around to knock it out. I don’t expect it to stick around through another website redesign; its archival value is minimal, and as an arts institution (and not journalism), I’m sure the Walker has much more important content to preserve, although as long as they have me, I will happily have my words sit on their site.

But in the case that my scribblings are retired forever and redirected to the homepage, I can use a tool like Authory to preserve my content.

Authory at a glance

Authory is a portfolio tool for writers, including full-time journalists, content marketers, or occasional subject matter experts. For a monthly fee, Authory permanently captures the text of all your digital bylines. (That is, as long as Authory is in business.)

As digital-only news outlets fragment and standards for preserving digital information are piecemeal at best, a tool like Authory provides security for those who want to maintain their digital writings in some sort of official, authoritative fashion.

Digital news outlets shouldn’t come and go with the frequency they do — and I hope we find ourself on the path to better ones with sustainable archives. Especially since venture- and PE-backed content publishers can be flippant and digital content strategies change all the time, the permalinks to our content may not be so permanent.

For those of us who write on the marketing side, the bylines are fewer and far between. The trade pub whose content I wrote for an entire year no longer has my byline on the site, and the blog posts I wrote at past agencies have mostly been scrubbed of my identity. All cool — but it would be nice to have all those clippings collected in one place.

Authory operates similarly to professional journalist tool Muck Rack: the tool crawls the outlets that have run your bylines regularly and will update your content automatically. Unlike Muck Rack, though, it’s a paid model that accommodates content from all writers — not just professional journalists. For those of us who have migrated into non-journalism content development — presumably because we have a sense of self-preservation and a desire to earn a sustainable living — Authory is a fine solution for maintaining a portfolio.

(I’m also extremely curious about how rights and ownership come into play with tools like Authory and the overbroad work for hire agreements that brands, agencies and publishers all have as standard in their contract. Like most digital-first aggregation companies, Authory’s terms of service require that you have permission to reprint or publish any articles housed on Authory, so if you upload without permission for purposes of a portfolio, I’d recommend that you keep your visibility private.)

Authory also lets writers

• Publish a free automated newsletter for fans, so subscribers are updated whenever you publish something new

• Download hard copies (in html or xml) of all of their content

• Catalog content from behind paywalls for their own private portfolios

• Toggle privacy settings — if you want to share your portfolio with just a few or with the public, your visibility is yours to control

• Create collections — related articles, beats you’ve covered, your greatest hits

If you do not want to maintain a portfolio website of your own (and I completely understand this sentiment in 2020, although it’s really not that hard to build an annually updated portfolio on your own), Authory is a solid interim solution.

Note: by writing this review, I may receive a free year of Authory, although I did not know that until after I wrote the review…

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Content tech links of the week

• Moz’s research about gender bias in the SEO industry is very good. Moz has always been relatively equitable, but the industry as a whole is definitely bro-y and dismissive of women’s voices, so I’m glad they put this together.

• I would love every local newspaper to have an ad-free tier. Here are some local news successes at the Bay Area News Group.

• New research on how people use Google search in 2020 from Brian Dean at Backlinko.

• I’m not a data scientist, but I understood and enjoyed parts of this explanation of how to remove gender bias from a word vector algorithm.

• Turns out I wasn’t wrong, blockchain is just a giant relational table that soaks up energy and not much else. From The Correspondent, whose footnote/citation/callout software is just grrrrrrreat.

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I am not frightened of or upset by looters or riots because the racial inequality is so stark in Minneapolis, and it has only gotten worse this summer. People are angry, people are suffering, and there have been very few solutions offered from those in charge. Despite our city council’s promise to defund the Minneapolis Police Department, we have seen no meaningful change since George Floyd was murdered, only small concessions around police reform that I (and many others) don’t trust the MPD to enforce, given their history and support of a racist police union.

What I have seen:

• White-owned and white-operated media replaying every video of graphic violence that hurts our Black neighbors, then handwringing around even the idea of making a change to the police department because of their “safety,” refusing to quote anyone who has actually studied police abolition, editorializing “there isn’t a plan” when they haven’t taken the time to listen to people doing the work of abolition. (Individual reporters have done good work, but the billionaire-owned newspaper and television stations continue to double down on the untenable status quo.)

• The MPD not really doing much of anything to prevent or solve the recent rise in shootings, even though they are still just as funded as they were in January.

• School boards and institutions cutting ties with local police departments but still hiring armed security officers, many of whom used to be cops, for “protection.”

• On Nextdoor, in the neighborhood where George Floyd was killed, white residents posting pro-cop and pro-gun propaganda with no shame, no hint of “moderation” on their end.

• A growing unhoused population being shuffled from one city park to another, supported by volunteers but not the federal, state or city government.

• Grassroots groups like MPD150, Black Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, the Minneapolis Sanctuary Movement, and Minnesota Teen Activists providing the foundation for true justice and (hopefully soon!) the redirection of resources away from military-backed law enforcement and toward people who are productively rebuilding the community.

• My neighbors surviving, thriving, supporting each other in spite of it all.

After Kenosha, where people were shot for 1.) breaking up a fight and 2.) protesting the first shooting, the pain is raw. (For those unfamiliar with U.S. geography, Kenosha is about 5 hours away from Minneapolis, in the neighboring state of Wisconsin, which shares many of Minnesota’s worst characteristics, especially around racial inequity.)

The violence in response to protest is outsized. It is dangerous. It comes from outside the city, from the suburbs and the outstate, from those who have always had the perception that the cities were dangerous and now feel the need to bring their ideas of war into our neighborhoods and escalate violence.

I’m frightened of the people who believe they are keeping the peace with guns. I’m more frightened for my Black neighbors who have historically been the target of that “peacekeeping.” The “second amendment people” who show such callous disregard for human life, the ones who do not even live in the city, who escalate from social media comments to shoot-to-kill in a matter of seconds. Who see someone breaking a window or stealing from a giant corporation or a liquor store and believe “that person is worthless and should be killed.” People who have been taught that property, goods and ownership are more important than ensuring others have basic food and shelter.

I’m frightened that feds will show up this weekend. Frightened of the MPD who drove around my neighborhood last night brandishing their assault rifles “to enforce the curfew.”

If you are in the U.S., please read Josie Marie Duffy’s case for abolition, which was published in Vanity Fair this month.

Also sending my heart out to those affected by Hurricane Laura and those in Kenosha, Chicago, Portland, Oakland and everywhere standing up for change.

Onto this week’s newsletter:

• My tech stack - second annual update

• Editing text on a live website: Markup.io review

• Three big-thinker content tech links of the week

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The Content Technologist’s stack update: 2020 edition

For comparison, check out 2019.

In my first year of business, I’ve mostly worked on content and migration strategy for website redesigns, with lots of SEO research included. I’ve incorporated some tools I reviewed in the past year and changed my tune on some others.

As with all reviews, I do not collect any affiliate commission, but I will share links for referral credits for tools that I already use. If you were already thinking of signing up for that tool, then feel free to use my referral and we’ll both get some credits.

Here’s where I’m at, with links to previous reviews where applicable:

• SEO: SEMRush (especially the Keyword Magic and auditing tools), Google Search Console & Screaming Frog. I’ve ditched Moz mostly for cost reasons, but I’m so annoyed with SEMRush’s constant display ads and upsells that I may switch back to Moz, even though I’m not as big of a fan of its keyword organization tools.

• Client collaboration: Mural.

• Sitemapping and content planning: Flowmapp.

• UX design and wireframing: Figma (free version).

• Content and audience research: When applicable, I subscribe to BuzzSumo and SparkToro for in-depth content and social research.

• Database for tool reviews: Airtable. (Referral code)

• Forms: Typeform.

• Visual asset creation: Canva. (Referral code)

• Measurement: Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

• Project management: Bella Scena and Toggl, plus whatever PM tool my client is using.

• Transcription and notes: Otter.ai premium (which recently added meeting notes and continues to amaze me — referral code)

• Writing: Evernote for mobile notes; Ulysses for desktop notes and long-form writing.

• Saving links: Pocket (recently switched from Notion)

• Video meetings: I use both Zoom and Google Meet, depending on what’s most convenient.

• Website CMS: Ghost

• Newsletter: Substack, for at least a little while longer because I really love the authorship experience, but I’m looking at shifting entirely to Ghost because right now I’m essentially entering content into two separate CMS, and that’s why the content-technologist.com is never up to date.

• Business management: 1Password, Wave and Bonsai.

I’m always testing and trying out new tools, and I review the best that come across my path. If you have a recommendation, reply to this email and I’ll put it in my queue.

Eliminating the vagaries of web and image feedback: Markup.io

Have you ever had this digital conversation?

CONTENT STRATEGIST: Hey, you know the Featured Feature page? Can you maybe center the H2 in the second section submodule? I think it might be more impactful centered.

FRONT-END DEV: The one that says “About This Feature”?

CONTENT STRATEGIST: No, that one’s on the Feature Introduction page, not the Featured Feature page. [drop in URL] The second one down from the top left side. The one that reads “Why this feature is the bestest.” That one. I’m thinking we could also change the words to “Why this feature is the funnest” but I want to see how it looks.

Describing the location of content on a webpage has long been a part of web content life. (Admittedly, the above example is a bit ridiculous, but I’ve described feedback that way, and I’m willing to bet you have too.)

We use spreadsheets and emails for QA describing the location of our feedback, in addition to providing the feedback itself. Designers spend half the time trying to decipher what a stakeholder is talking about before even making the change to the text.

I have often wished for a tool where I could just write my comments on a website, the way I can just write design feedback on a piece of paper. And finally, all these years later, we have a solid tool that lets users pin content feedback to any live website: Markup.io.

Markup.io at a glance

Markup.io is a collaborative visual feedback tool created by designers to simplify feedback processes, owned by interactive content company Ceros (reviewed here). Markup users can enter in any project URL or upload an image and receive pinned feedback in real time.

The pinned feedback commenting system is similar to those in Figma, XD, and InVision, with teammate tagging and comment response. Markup.io also features:

• Options to leave feedback on desktop, tablet and mobile versions of the website (without leaving the desktop browser)

• Toggle from commenting mode to browsing mode while leaving feedback, so you can cover all pages on a website at once.

• Publicly sharable links of feedback so that an entire team can view and respond to feedback on a certain image or website (I’ve made a few self-deprecating comments on my own website here if you want a preview of how Markup works)

• Replies and resolution for all comments

• Live updates for websites — so if a change has been made, it will appear in each project upon reload

Released in April 2020, Markup.io is currently free and usable for any live website (including dev sites) and uploaded images. Its website promises integrations with third-party tools in the near future, along with more project management features. (I also very much dig their simple but explanatory website.)

Many tools are entering the live website feedback/commenting space, including some similarly named, but Markup.io certainly has made the biggest splash since its launch, especially in our sudden transition to remote work.

I would recommend Markup.io for designers, content strategists, and developers having challenges communicating visual website feedback, especially among multiple teams.

I’d also suggest it to content strategists or agencies for their new business processes — with Markup.io you can comment in directly and clearly what you would change about a website without alerting the current creators or stepping on any toes.

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Content tech links of the week

• At Protocol, a profile of Color of Change, a nonprofit that started out providing relief for victims of Hurricane Katrina that became the driving force behind a civil rights audit at Facebook.

• Have you ever wondered what tech-oriented minds think about when they build algorithms? Avinash Kaushik (Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google and the thought leader behind many of our digital marketing standards) walks through a hypothetical content evaluation algorithm in his newsletter and, boy howdy, it’s enlightening. It’s always fascinating to me when engineering-oriented folks break down content because they focus on completely different evaluation criteria than my editorial training would guide me toward. But I agree on the result of which of the infographics is best!

• How is Facebook still peddling discriminatory advertising? The Markup (not to be confused with this week’s tool review) has a good story, but anyone working in the ad/data space should deeply consider this common circumstance:

Things that Facebook may consider innocuous data points may correlate so strongly with age or gender or race that “the algorithm sees the circumstances of older black women, which are the result of systemic discrimination and inequity, and misinterprets those circumstances as preferences,” David Brody, an attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in an email.

“So the next time the algorithm encounters a user matching the qualities of an older black woman, it is going to impute those so-called preferences on to that user and in the process reinforce the pattern of systemic discrimination,” he said.

How do we determine the difference between preferences and circumstances? (There are ways and they have everything to do with opt-in, which will be the subject of an upcoming newsletter.)

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