Fintan is the outgoing Editor-in-Chief of Roar News, King’s College London’s student newspaper. In 2024, he was commended by the Student Publication Association as the Best Journalist in London and given the Billy Dowling-Reid Award for Outstanding Commitment to Student Media. He will be starting an International Journalism MA at City University in September 2024 and in the long term he hopes to break into foreign correspondence or investigative reporting.
July 26, 2024 (Updated )
Dan Cody’s background isn’t the most conventional for a journalist. Starting out in commercial search functionality, he moved into the newsroom after realising his passion for storytelling. This love has guided everything he’s done since, including his work at the Evening Standard and the recent launch of interactive storytelling website Thereafter.
We talked with Dan at the Student Press Association National Conference 2024 about a day in the life of a search engine optimisation (SEO) editor, the future of AI in journalism, and whether SEO has ‘peaked’. And, if it has, what should newsrooms be doing more or less of?
What would be a typical day for you at the Evening Standard? Do you start in the evening?
Not so much evening any more, despite the name! First thing in the morning, we are jumping on a tool like Google Trends to see what are the most popular topics in search. That could be in any category of news and it will throw up a whole load of search terms that you can use in articles for that day. There’s a print edition to the Standard — with that comes the challenge to the SEO team to make sure that [copy] is SEO-friendly. We’re matching what the output of the paper is going to be that day with what people are searching, so there’s a twin role in that sense between the print and the digital side. That’s how the day starts.
We’ve got a team of SEO freelancers that we manage. Their primary role is pitching stories to us based on what they’ve seen in search trends and we’re also briefing them on trending topics. They’re trained in SEO-optimised content, they know the kind of headlines to write to get really good search visibility, and they know the way to write that searchers are looking for. On the strategic side of it, they have us looking at the structure of the articles, optimising those articles even further, and then mapping out different kinds of content we have to make sure it’s clear to Google which articles link to which down the chain.
"AI’s probably going to be the biggest change. Google is moving more towards generative search where, as a searcher, you’ll see a question being answered comprehensively, without so many links to publishers, which is a really scary thing. What it will do is to put a lot of pressure on both traditional journalists and digital journalists to create really amazing journalism. The competition’s going to become fiercer."
Dan Cody, SEO Editor, The Evening Standard
What’s a really good day for the SEO team at the paper?
For me personally, I think one of my favourite things is when we break through in a new subject area that we perhaps thought we didn’t have as much authority on. So recently, I’m really proud of our efforts in gaming. My [former] colleague Seren Morris, in particular, is incredibly intuitive when it comes to search and making sure we can cut through on that subject, in a way that we’ve really not been able to before, with really targeted commissioning.
At the end of the day, when I can look back and say that we’ve outdone our expectations on something, that’s what I really enjoy. That’s an SEO thing I think. You get used to things performing in a certain way and, eventually, you crack the algorithm on something, you get visibility and it’s awesome when that happens.
This is a relatively new field of journalism, what got you into it?
I got into SEO itself outside of journalism. I think that it was quite serendipitous that those skills transferred into something that I’ve always loved, which is journalism; a field that I really wanted to get into.
As you say, it’s a very new thing and the audience team that I work in, that department in news organisations is a relatively new concept. I was lucky that when I decided it was time for me to get into this world that I so loved, there was that need for search professionals.
What’s the future of SEO in the newsroom?
I think it’s probably going to be more in-demand and I think AI’s probably going to be the biggest change that will drive that. Google is moving more and more towards generative search where, as a searcher, you’ll see a question being answered comprehensively, without so many links to publishers, which is a really scary thing.
What it will do is put a lot of pressure on both traditional journalists and digital journalists to create really amazing journalism. The competition’s going to become fiercer, unfortunately, but that’s going to be an amazing thing to be a part of. I think journalism’s going to be much, much better as a result because it will be much less cynical and much more about providing people with something that they actually want to read, away from just traditional keyword inclusion.
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If you were to design a trajectory into SEO journalism, how would you recommend people go about it?
I think one thing that I found really valuable is that I had mentors who told me to get stuck into stuff. We played around with SEO tools and we made our own websites, which is something that I always recommend for people to do, start making blogs, websites, sell something — it’s so easy to get started nowadays [and] see how search works first-hand.
One thing I’d do differently is not be so hesitant to enter into something like coding, or something that seems really complicated. AI is one of the big ones — people think it’s some big, scary thing that they’re never going to be able to get their heads around but actually it’s not that complicated as a principle. Once you start using it, it can be really, really helpful. You’re going to be one of the first people that you work with who are using it, you’re going to be quite an early adopter in your business.
You’ve talked about how technology will change how we read the news, but is AI going to change how we write it too?
It’s all about the question — it sounds slightly too simple to say as an answer about SEO, but the only difference between searching with AI and searching with Google is that the questions can be even more complicated and you can rely even more on the tool to give you answers. One of the main changes with the content is that the questions you address as a writer, you’re going to have to address them even more comprehensively than you did in the past.
"When it comes to AI, people are going to be using it to search for complicated questions and the AI’s going to be able to give them a plethora of answers or spit out an essay; it’s going to rely on journalists to feed the algorithm that content. That’s where that fierce competition comes in."
Dan Cody, SEO Editor, The Evening Standard
I think that when I first got into SEO, it was quite easy to give shallow answers to questions and you could game the algorithm quite easily. When it comes to something like AI, people are going to be using it to search for all kinds of complicated questions and the AI’s going to be able to give them a plethora of answers or spit out an essay, it’s going to rely on journalists to feed the algorithm that content. That’s where that fierce competition comes in — hopefully, your long-read informative content is actually going to pay off.
Has working in SEO made you more sceptical about the content that you’re fed online?
I’m actually optimistic that it’s helping people get the right answers. I think the difference between SEO journalism and any other type of journalism is that you’re giving people what they’re actually looking for, versus trying to give them what you think that they’re looking for. I think that’s where I’m quite optimistic, even as a searcher myself, that I’m consuming something that is actually going to be useful to me. SEO, when it’s done right, is just helping people find your content. You shouldn’t be cynically trying to shoehorn something that doesn’t fit a searcher’s need into their hands, it should just be a natural thing.
You’ve launched a new project called Thereafter, what was the inspiration behind that and what’s the hope?
The inspiration behind that was blockchain technology, funnily enough. It was the idea that people in a decentralised way verify something that’s happening one step after another. Even though I’m no expert in that field, I was researching that for something that I was writing at the time, and I thought that would be a really interesting idea to apply to narratives and storytelling.
The idea that people decide what happens at each new step of a story, based on either what they think should happen in terms of the character development or in terms of the twists and turns of the story. It’s been really exciting to see people quickly adopt that idea and see the potential of where it can go in terms of building out this story.
It’s about community-building and helping people to express themselves in their creative writing as well. One of the things in the platform that I really thought was important was that you could submit any length of content. You can go onto Thereafter and you can say ‘and then the door opened’ or you can put in five paragraphs waxing lyrical. You can treat it any way you want and it’s completely free and open to any level of writer as well. I think that means that it’s naturally building up this community that’s quite excited about it.
On both the SEO side and Thereafter, you merge your two interests of writing creatively and integrating technology. Have they both always been important to you?
Stories are the things that really get me going. That’s the thread that follows through everything that I’ve ever really worked in. Even when I got into SEO, in the more commercial end of it, I think the thing that really drove me was the content side of it and putting together stories. I’ve always been interested in different mediums.
I was previously working in film before I worked in SEO, and storytelling is the core principle of that. Wherever I go career-wise, it’s always been driven by a need to tell stories and to help people tell stories as well.
