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How To Implement Editorial Staff Changes

kcfield
  |     |   188 posts since 2012

As a contributing freelance writer to one of the nation's largest magazines, I have been through senior editor transitions and know how challenging these can be. I wanted to offer some suggestions to the new LendingTree/DA management and editorial staff. Please take what is helpful and disregard the rest!

1) Introduce yourselves! We have all come to know and love Ken Tumin for his valuable and thoughtful leadership and contributions over the last 18 years or so. It would be helpful for Ali C to introduce himself and the new writers. Share a bit about your editorial background and your hopes and goals for DA.

2) Get to know your readers. As a whole, DA readers are quite knowledgeable and sophisticated with respect to savings, the Fed, and the economy. Therefore, while beginning banking articles may be quite helpful on a website with neophyte savers. they aren't helpful here. On the other hand, in depth analysis of the above noted three topics would be quite helpful indeed.

2A) Ask your readership for feedback. Successful senior management and editorial changes require the wisdom and humility to ask questions. Why not ask the readers what topics are of greatest value to them; and which topics are less valuable and helpful.

3) We understand about the need for search engine optimization (SEO), but please focus on the actual most popular SEO financial topics. Several of my fellow readers have pointed out that the new management seems to be focused on SEO, and my observation would be the same. However, focusing on SEO does not mean writing beginning banking articles or telling financially sophisticated readers how to find their account numbers. The five most popular SEO search terms with respect to finance are: investment and investment management, mortgage, financial services, loans, and mortgage calculations (source: diib.com). While not all of these topics are DA relevant, investments and financial services certainly are and could be incorporated into new blog articles.

Ali, I'd like to take this time to welcome you and your new staff, and hope that you will consider some of the suggestions here so that you can bring in new readers while maintaining the longtime loyal readers here on DA.

Best Regards,

KCfield

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me1004
  |     |   1,381 posts since 2010
Wow, I see that story in your link, and the date on it of yesteday. Why do I not see it in my feed of the Blog?

What they have done to that is add in a number of SEO things, all the subheads, the bullets. Those and other things in the story are for SEO.

This is what I have said. They should let Ken continue to write his stories, throw in that irritating SEO crap, like the bullets at the top, the subheads, maybe change some words to use more keywords. I don't know all the little things for SEO, but those I mentioned are part of it, add in some other -- but be sparing about it, do not get greedy, do not do SEO to the point of undermining the quality of the content, let Ken have the freedom to write what he does so well at, don't undermine his stories.

And with that, we could have the old level of quality back again, it would simply look a but different with all the subheads and bullets and numbered paragraphs instead of bullets. Ken's style of wriing the blog posts actually lends itself to putting in subheads. It was a formula style, made it easy to read from one to another of the stories, we knew how they were structured and could read them smoothly and quickly. It was similar to different sections of the story, whch is where you can put in the subheads.

Possibly this one is a test to see how that can go. Buit I don't see it in my Blog presentation. Do other people? If not, then they might have put it up, but behind the scenes, in other words, invisible. Invisible to we readers does not make it invisible to the SEO effects, it can still draw in the clicks. I hope they are not going to regurgitate all the old stories but with SEO added, instead of letting Ken get back to his old Blog, keeping us up to date on the latest deals and continue his production of quality aand infomative stories on topics this Webiste is about: good and the best rates, plus some very solid analyses and explanatory stories on topics directly related to that.

I'm not sure yet if this is a good sign about the blog possibly coming back. Time will tell. It at least looks to me lilke they think they can get a lot of punch out of recirculating the old stoires with a new date on them and with all the SEO added in, but possibly behind the scenes. But if they think that works, there is no rason not to be curent by putting Ken back on his old beat. And I will say, if I were Ken, I would be making plans to walk out on thm -- and then they would not have the possibility of such a good Website.

But they have to think when they do it. While the comments section might be an SEO item too, you can't have it in there with the dates of the comments from 10 or more years ago! And you can't just change the dates either, that can have an effect of libeling the writer or at least falsifying the content.
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NYCDoug
  |     |   335 posts since 2011
Note that, as of today, in the Blog section the direct link to the Comments has been disappeared.

Rest assured, our comments are still there (including under those posts akin to How to Sharpen a Pencil, as well as prior ones that are more insightful). But you now have to enter the article, proper, and scroll to it's end, to see the comment section, or add to it.

I suppose this is the new administration's way of discouraging both seeing comments, and adding to them. (Or even making them!) At least they haven't carted them away, in toto, in paddy wagons — as is the fate of some contemporary protestors :-)
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