Newspaper roasted for 'Where is Nick Saban?'

There’s been quite a digital media trend of publications running explainers with questions in the headline in hopes of grabbing Google traffic by aligning headlines to things people might search for, from the endless “What time is the Super Bowl?” posts and beyond. Lately, though, these sorts of search engine optimization (SEO) posts have taken on a bigger role at even more traditional newspapers, and they’ve gone beyond game times to very basic things on players and coaches. And the latest example of that, and one that took a lot of fire, is the Tuscaloosa News (the daily newspaper in the Alabama Crimson Tide’s home city) running and tweeting a “Where is Nick Saban?” piece Saturday:

Very obviously, Saban is no longer coaching the Tide. He retired after last season and joined ESPN in an extremely high-profile role, including regular appearances on the network’s well-watched College GameDay (where people across the country and beyond could see him live Saturday). So there was absolutely no mystery about where he was. And that led to a lot of roasting for the newspaper:

The interesting thing with the actual piece here is that it’s not from anyone with the News . Instead, it’s syndicated through the USA Today Network, part of News owner Gannett. The piece is from John Leuzzi, a “Big Ten/SEC trending reporter” for the network, and his recent archive is almost entirely these kinds of pieces, from “ Does LSU football play today? ” to “ Will Jim Harbaugh be in attendance for Michigan’s game today ?” (The answer to both is “No,” as you’d expect from Betteridge’s law of headlines , but the “Who is” and “Where is” pieces at least manage to avoid that.)

The piece in question is not particularly worth reading, except for the aforementioned people who do live under a rock and somehow missed Saban’s retirement eight months ago and his subsequent move to ESPN. It’s mostly not problematic, though, except for a claim of “curiosity has risen on where Saban is, and why he’s no longer manning the sidelines for the Crimson Tide.” (Citation needed! Who, exactly, is curious about that?) But the wild part of this is not just running this on a newspaper site in Tuscaloosa, where, presumably, most of the population is already well aware that Saban retired, but also tweeting it from the official newspaper account. That’s just asking for a quote-tweeting.

Each media outlet can obviously make their own decisions on what content they find worth producing and publishing. And this particular piece, as a syndicated one, still would have existed even if the News hadn’t picked it up, and perhaps their decision to do so will get them some of that search traffic they’re clearly chasing. The question does still remain if anyone is actually asking “Where is Nick Saban?”, but it is notable that not everyone followed his move to ESPN, as Tulane coach Jon Sumrall illustrated Saturday:

The easy own goal to avoid here comes from the paper tweeting this out, though. That may not have been a highly-intentional choice; their X/Twitter feed is mostly just autoposts of stories, and it may be set up to tweet everything. But if they were determined to run this story on their website to try and grab that search traffic, they could have done so quietly, not featured it on their homepage, and not tweeted it, and avoided this roasting in the process. Then again, if the paper is taking the stance that all attention is good attention, they may not mind this too much.

[ The Tuscaloosa News ]

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