Via Mindy McAdams I found this discussion about local newspapers and local search:
Newspapers have the best local content for local restaurants, movie reviews, local business, school sports, and should be the first search result for any local search. They are not. Greg Linden says Newspapers should own local. I think they don't because they don't think globally. They don't think about how to make their valuable content friendly to search engines.Much of this goes back to the lack of SEO within newspaper content, highlighted by Skrentablog.
One issue is that most papers remove their content or put it behind a pay wall. From a pay wall standpoint the papers are just looking to generate revenue by selling access to older articles. For many papers this is easy money. However are they trading this short term revenue for the long term search benefits?
Any blogger that has looked over their stats knows that the real traffic is in the old stuff. I have a few older posts that have thousands and thousands of visits, mostly generated from Google/Yahoo!/MSN.
Like the recent issues surrounding citizen journalism, the traditional papers are just realizing that they need to pay attention to this stuff. However, reworking existing content management systems and tasking over-worked technical producers is easier said than done.
