An opportunity to watch Internet innovation unfold

The newspaper industry is struggling to adapt to the Internet. Digital Ink reported last month that a group of award-winning Chicago journalists will gather for a forum on June 12 to discuss “whether newspapers can survive in the Internet age, with circulation falling and advertising shrinking at almost every big paper in America.”

Although I don’t expect any ground-breaking marketing theory to erupt from their discussion, these kinds of group-think events often serve as the seeds for exploring new ideas and changing directions. The process of altering the path and mode of an industry’s marketing efforts is huge and when you’re up close it may seem slow. But one day one or more of these journalists may write a book that points back to this forum and says, “This is where we first glimpsed the future of the newspaper industry”.

Search engine optimization may very well be impacted again by the ideas that the news reporting industry incubates. Today’s search environment has been shaped in many ways by the news reporting industry, and I’m not just referring to universal search (where the major search engines inject news stories into their Web search results).

If any of you are interested in how an industry conceives of, shapes, and implements initiatives around Internet technology, you should keep an eye on Digital Ink and other journalism resources that follow the story. Take notes and file them away in a safe place. Set up some Web, Blog, and News alerts through the search engines to see what new content is indexed on the topic. Do keyword research BEFORE someone else decides what the relevant keywords should be.

This is an opportunity for people to engage in long-term research and observation from the start of a process. That’s what SEO theory is really all about. Learning ahead of the curve so that you can optimize not only your search results but your return on investment.