A Look at SEO, the Media and Manti Te'o
By now, most of you are aware of Manti Te'o- if not for his athleticism in his role as a linebacker at Notre Dame, or for his emergence as a a Heisman Trophy candidate, then for the attention he's received in the last month for his claims that he was a victim of a hoax which placed him in an online relationship with a nonexistent woman.
The story, which broke January 16, was widely circulated by the media, with a focus on uncovering the facts about Te'o; was he involved in the hoax? Who was the entity behind the fake girlfriend? What is the real story?
Though, another focus in the hoax has become the media itself, which continued to report stories about the woman and failed to investigate her role in Te'o stories.
As a Senior journalism and mass communication major at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism (and a Notre Dame football fan), I have been researching the media's role in reporting this story since it broke.
I thought it would be interesting to see how each news organization is reporting the story- differently, or otherwise, and began looking into the SEO (search-engine optimization) of stories which I gathered from three different organizations- CBS, the Huffington Post and USA Today.
Although all three organizations are reporting on the same story, CBS appears to focus on the woman featured in the fake Manti Te'o photograph, Diane O' Meara.
The Huffington Post, on the other hand, focuses on the visuals of the story- the woman's interview, and uses words like "fake," "girlfriend," and "speaks."
Contrarily, USA Today keeps it simple, only including the key words "Manti Te'o girlfriend hoax," "Manti Te'o," and "NCAA Football."
Although the story is still progressing, it will be interesting to keep an eye on how the media continues to report this story- whether, over time, organizations will self-reflect and begin to focus more on themselves and less on the deadline of the story, or whether journalists will move on with reporting the story and, as Auburn University journalism professor John Carvalho says, "paste over" their previous mistakes.
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