Four newsrooms used SEO without a dedicated specialist position
Four Greek newsroom interviews describe SEO responsibilities without dedicated specialist positions (Giomelakis, Karypidou and Veglis, 2019, §6.2).
Every newsroom in this four-outlet interview study reported using SEO, yet none reported a dedicated SEO specialist position. The work fell to people with other responsibilities or an external contributor. Giomelakis, Karypidou and Veglis, 2019, §§6.1 to 6.2, reprint PDF p. 78, printed p. 69.
The interesting detail is the gap between adopting practices and giving someone clear responsibility for them. It is a useful organizational question for a software company, too. It is not a measured estimate of what hiring an SEO specialist would do to its traffic or its presence in AI answers.
Who spoke for the organizations?
The authors interviewed four representatives from four Greek media outlets during June and July 2019. The outlets were Thestival.gr, Tvxs.gr, Neolaia.gr and Thessnews.gr. The selection included national and local publishers, online-only outlets and an outlet associated with a newspaper. It was an exploratory selection intended to capture different organizational circumstances. [§4, reprint PDF pp. 75 to 76, printed pp. 66 to 67].
The respondents’ reported roles were an SEO manager, two general directors and a business owner. The inclusion rule was that a respondent had a relevant SEO role or responsibility for SEO strategy. This is not a survey of randomly selected journalists, readers or all employees at each outlet. One representative’s account stands for the organization in the reported analysis. [§4].
There is a wording tension worth preserving. The methods identify one interviewee as an SEO manager, while the results say that none of the outlets had a specific SEO specialist job. The paper does not fully reconcile a respondent’s role label with that staffing finding. Both statements remain in our account. [§4 and §6.2].
The distinction may depend on dedicated versus combined responsibilities, but that explanation is an inference. The publication does not provide enough employment detail to settle it. A later summary should not convert the interviews into a verified headcount audit.
How were the interviews analyzed?
The researchers sent questions and a semi-structured questionnaire electronically. Most questions were open-ended; fixed-response questions covered selected characteristics, familiarity and reported practices. Respondents could explain their choices. The authors used thematic analysis, reading and coding responses, grouping recurring patterns, refining themes and connecting them to the research questions. [§4, PDF pp. 76 to 77].
That approach is suited to describing experiences and organizational reasoning. It does not independently verify every reported activity. It also differs from observing the newsroom over time, inspecting its complete analytics records or randomly assigning a new publishing practice.
The questions themselves help bound the claims. They ask who is responsible, which practices are used, which metrics matter and what respondents think SEO changes. A respondent’s belief that a practice benefits journalism remains a belief reported in an interview. The analysis cannot turn it into a measured causal effect simply by placing it in a results section.
You can read the paper for its account of decision making without treating every sentence about search algorithms in the surrounding literature discussion as a finding of these interviews. Those are different evidence sources with different questions behind them.
What did the outlets report doing?
| Topic | Reported observation | Original location |
|---|---|---|
| Specialist staffing | No dedicated specialist position reported across the four outlets; responsibilities assigned elsewhere | §6.2, PDF p. 78 |
| Search research | Keyword research, topical interest and popular queries were common reported practices | §6.2, PDF p. 78 |
| Content preparation | Titles, descriptions and internal links were prominent reported practices | §6.4, PDF p. 80 |
| Traffic monitoring | Every representative reported using Google Analytics | §6.3, PDF p. 79 |
| Monitoring frequency | Two daily, one several times daily, one weekly | §6.3, PDF p. 79 |
| Editorial influence | Respondents said SEO affected selection or editing of stories | §§6.4 to 6.5, PDF pp. 80 to 81 |
These are descriptions of the interviewed cases. The common base is four organizational representatives, not a population of all Greek media. We retain counts and qualitative wording rather than presenting small purposive-sample percentages as a national adoption rate. A binomial interval would not repair the selection or reporting limitations.
The frequency detail is particularly revealing. Measuring traffic was normal within these cases, but measurement schedules and responsibilities differed. The presence of analytics software did not by itself define a shared editorial purpose or a common interpretation of success.
The paper also records link exchange among some respondents. That is a historical report of practice, not advice from us to reproduce it. Describing what organizations said they did is different from establishing that a technique is effective, permitted by current policies or appropriate for your site. [§6.2, PDF p. 79].
What does the traffic evidence establish?
Respondents in three outlets described search traffic at roughly 30% to 40%; the remaining outlet described 10% to 20%. These are interview-reported ranges, without the underlying visit counts, common reporting period or independently inspected channel records. [§6.3, PDF p. 79, printed p. 70].
We cannot reconstruct a pooled search-traffic share or a Wilson interval from those ranges. Weighting each outlet equally would answer a different question from weighting individual visits, and neither is justified without the missing data. The ranges indicate why search mattered to these respondents. They do not quantify the effect of an SEO program.
There is also no before-and-after comparison establishing an increment attributable to a practice. An outlet can receive substantial search traffic while its editorial routines, audience, topic mix and established reputation all contribute to that traffic. The interview design does not isolate those influences.
For a B2B company, the parallel is practical: a familiar analytics dashboard does not make every explanation of its numbers causal. Ask which records support a claim, which period they cover and what else changed. The question remains useful even when the organization is confident about its own account.
Where did editorial priorities complicate optimization?
Respondents linked SEO to story selection, headlines, descriptions, placement and the life of an article on the site. They also differed in how they thought it affected journalistic quality. The paper does not present optimization as a single routine with identical consequences in every newsroom. [§§6.4 to 6.5, PDF pp. 80 to 81].
That makes the organizational issue more interesting than a missing job title. A person may know how to change a headline while lacking authority to decide whether the change suits the story. An editor may value search traffic and still resist a headline that misstates the reporting. Responsibility includes resolving such competing purposes, not merely operating a tool.
The authors write that the study is “not claiming to be representative.” They also explicitly say that results depend on the accuracy and honesty of respondents. Those are central limits, not small-print exceptions to a general law about how newsrooms work. [§7, PDF p. 82, printed p. 73].
We grade this use C: a small exploratory, self-reported case study that offers context and questions. That judgment does not make the interviews useless. It restricts the claims they can carry. They can illustrate how responsibility and priorities are described; they cannot establish a general return from a staffing change.
What can a software company reasonably borrow?
A fictional company, Cedarline Software, could use the interview topics to inspect its own responsibilities. Who can correct an inaccurate product description? Who decides whether documentation needs a clearer title? Who checks whether a published claim still has a source? Who can distinguish a search visit from an AI citation?
These are questions prompted by the paper, not a validated management intervention derived from it. They may reveal a gap without prescribing a new department. For a small team, giving an existing person clear responsibility may be more feasible than creating a specialist position. The trade-off concerns available staff time and authority, which the interview study does not price or experimentally compare.
The measurement has to remain separate from the remedy. If a company is rarely named in a fixed set of buyer answers, that is an observation about those answers. It does not identify whether the cause is staffing, source coverage, product fit, question selection or something else. The newsroom cases do not supply the missing causal test.
The paper’s strongest use is as a record of how practitioners describe that tension. Its weakest use would be a promise that appointing an SEO owner must produce a particular traffic or citation gain. You can ask the organizational questions while leaving that promise unmade.
What our own data shows
Oracle OPERA Cloud is named in 25 of 149 valid target answers in the September 2026 hotel-property-management category: 16.8%, descriptive 95% Wilson interval 11.6% to 23.6%. Absence Index release 2026-09; the category’s vendor rows and validity flags provide the base.
That result does not reveal the vendor’s staffing or explain the absence. We have no measurement of its internal responsibilities on this point. The newsroom interviews and the answer observation can sit beside one another without turning either into an unsupported explanation of the other.
Sources
- Giomelakis, D., Karypidou, C., & Veglis, A. (2019). SEO inside newsrooms: Reports from the field. Future Internet, 11(12), 261. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi11120261 . Methods §4, results §§6.1 to 6.5, limitations §7. Reprint PDF pp. 72 to 86. Accessible original Verified 30 October 2026.
- Broadcastwell. (2026). Absence Index, release 2026-09 [Data set]. Zenodo. Release JSON, answer JSONL and README. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22907695 Verified 30 October 2026.
Cite this page
Broadcastwell research team. (2026, October 30). Four newsrooms used SEO without a dedicated specialist position. Broadcastwell. https://docs.broadcastwell.com/research/sources/giomelakis-2019/ Published 30 October 2026; updated 30 October 2026.
@online{broadcastwell2026research17,
author = {{Broadcastwell research team}},
title = {Four newsrooms used SEO without a dedicated specialist position},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-10-30},
url = {https://docs.broadcastwell.com/research/sources/giomelakis-2019/},
urldate = {2026-10-30},
note = {Published 2026-10-30; updated 2026-10-30}
}
Prepared by the Broadcastwell research team. Lead: Ethan Brooks, management consultant.
Sources checked 30 October 2026. Independent check: 30 October 2026, Broadcastwell verification desk. This page has not been peer reviewed.
Last updated: 30 October 2026. Next review: 30 January 2027.