Appeasing the Google Gods

Our mission -- and we have no choice but to accept it -- is to grab some of that traffic that could otherwise end up at hundreds of other places, even blogs riffing off the reporting that your own publication has done. If you appease the Google gods with the right keywords, you are blessed with more readers. So carried to a hypothetical extreme, an ideal headline would be, "Sarah Palin rips non-Muslim Obama over mosque while Lady Gaga remains silent." Every newsroom in the country grapples with these questions, and The Washington Post is no exception.

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On a recent Wednesday morning, some Post editors were frustrated that the primary election results weren't garnering many hits -- despite the fact that John McCain had just won his party's nomination and Lisa Murkowski was on the verge of losing hers. What was hot, the traffic directors said, was Elin Nordegren telling People that her life had been "hell" since her husband's sex scandal, a photo of an alligator in the Chicago River, and a video posted on Gawker of a British woman throwing a feral cat into a dumpster.

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Middleground said:

The cat was not feral. Where did he get that notion?

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Deuce said:

Well, not any more it wasn't!

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