applying marketing focus to journalism

On page 129 Jordan Gold speaks generally about moving print content online. When picking out this particular segment of Gold’s interview I must have misread what was actually being said, since nothing of real essence is brought to the table in this short excerpt. However if we take a closer look at the few substantial statements Gold does make on page 129, taking the rest of the interview in consideration, it still becomes clear that Gold is a person that knows his field, obviously
Something I did find interesting here was the topic of applying marketing focus to journalism, i.e. with an online headline you are no longer just telling what’s in the article, instead you’re marketing the article. Gold doesn’t fully agree with this and remarks that it’s always been about making good leads to draw people in, in both print and in web journalism. It’s not clear if this means that he has always considered headlining to be a form of marketing, or if he has never considered it at all, though I think it’s implied that he’s leaning towards the later. He does however make the distinction of drawing a person into an article and drawing a person to clicking a link, and to me this is the fundamental difference between print and online journalism. If you already have a newspaper in front of you, it doesn’t take even half the effort to get you to read the article, however if you have to click a link to see the article, if you actually have to take action to get to the article, so much more interest has to have been awaken to get you to do it, especially if you happen to have a slow Internet connection. To me this is where it starts being about marketing the article. Instead of making the headline a compact summary of the article, as so the case in traditional print journalism, it’s about creating a buzz of interest. A buzz big enough to make a user click the link. Is this then really still pure journalism? Well obviously not in its purest form, but starting a discussion of what journalism really is about is an endless one. However something else of interest here is how Gold relates web headlining to the one on the cover of traditional magazines, and now when thinking about it, the similarities are really obvious, wondering how this has never passed my mind before. Magazines have been using the same type of half mysterious headlines with that higher drawing power on their covers for ages, trying to get people to buy them and open them up, on the same way online headlines want people to click their links. The transition for magazines to the online world should therefore not be a very hard one. I believe the only thing holding publishers back from transferring from print to web is the fear that Gold speaks about in his interview, the fear of the web not being sustainable.