Say Goodbye To Ye Olde Editorial Process

There may always be a place for paper. This isn't about that – the likelihood that print is on the verge of extinction – but rather how a new generation of editors and writers present the news in a digital world. The new format for news – there must always be a standard eventually – is evolving, as dinosaurs wheeze and choke.

Nielsen also says beginning a sentence with a numeral is not only acceptable, but preferable to online readers scanning the page. But then he refers to something much more interesting: Nielsen reverses himself:

Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

Traditional editors reading this may ask, "For what kind of effectiveness?" This may be a matter judgment, though, and not necessarily a hard and fast rule, but passive voice can help readers find the information scent in the search results, where titles and blurbs or ledes appear.

It depends on the situation, of course. Maybe your initial headline reads "Reindeer mauls Santa Claus," but if you want the information scent to begin with Santa – if optimizing for "Santa" in the SERPs – you might want to rearrange to "
The most important words – "Santa," "Claus," and "mauled" come to the foreground.       

It's not only the language that's changing, but also the editorial process. Dave Winer, the one who brought us RSS and, arguably, blogging, has been tinkering with the New York Times RSS feed to develop what he calls the New York Times "river."

Winer hasn't settled yet on the best way to deliver, either by keyword, chronology, but what he's developing is definitely a way around the traditional editor's choice of what's important. The "river" displays article headlines and blurbs from the Times in text only, organized by the reader's preference.

Salon co-founder

There's a lot more to this, but this is a Web article and most stopped reading 500 words ago. Too bad for them. They'll miss a link to my