Appeasing the Google Gods

[Commentary] Every newsroom in the country grapples with these questions, and The Washington Post is no exception. Our mission -- and we have no choice but to accept it -- is to grab some of that traffic that could otherwise end up at hundreds of other places, even blogs riffing off the reporting that your own publication has done.

If you appease the Google gods with the right keywords, you are blessed with more readers. So carried to a hypothetical extreme, an ideal headline would be, "Sarah Palin rips non-Muslim Obama over mosque while Lady Gaga remains silent." But the dilemma goes well beyond headlines to what content to post on your site, and people like me are hardly exempt. If I write about Radar revealing Mel Gibson's abusive calls to his girlfriend, or the coverage of Tiger Woods' multiple mistresses, my traffic will undoubtedly soar above that for a sober report on how nonprofit groups are pursuing investigative reporting. Like most of my colleagues, I try not to let that affect my judgment, but it hangs in the ether.