The Internet is more important source of news for the cohort of age 18-34, while reading newspapers are less important part of their day.a study conducted by Online Publishers Association has this finding for the media consumption pattern in 2004.

Let’s not jump into a hasty conclusion of the print-is-dead kind of pronouncement. Today print is still very alive. I think more accurately we should say, news consumption through multi-media channels is very prevalent among every professional cohort.

Cartoon by Dave Walker.
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But the marketers should know even though the content is the same, news consumption on papers and news search engines are two distinctive behaviors that make the user engagement process totally different. Unlike print media that communicate with users through a two-dimensional layout controlled by human editors, search engines communicate with users through ranking and priority controlled by computer algorithms. The user experience is purely contextual versus the user experience on print can be more graphical.

So for a news writer to engage a user on search engines, the engaging point is seeded simultaneously when the news content is composed. Though not much has been revealed about news search algorithms, to start engaging a user on search engines, think along with these parameters in your news writing:

• - popularity of the topic
• - recency of the article
• - length of the article
• - density of the key term

Also visit USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, they publish articles about online news publishing and a guideline of how to write for the web.

So now we know how to write for the web, how to engage the target audiences, but we’ve missed one important step: how to submit the article. Of course you can wait for the news crawlers to come and grab your news content, you can also submit it through the search engine affiliates (consider this is a more effective way but fee is tagged) or to submit it directly to the search engines. Google has a very comprehensive FAQ on its publisher help page. A special version of Google News Sitemap is also developed for making the news content inclusion on Google more easily. It should also work for all other search engines.

Not only the marketers who can make effective use of the search engines for communications, I suggest news publishers should also take advantage from all these geek tools to enhance existing user engagement strategy, and gain referral traffic from the search engines.

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