Last week MediaGuido reported that the Telegraph’s digital guru and pantomime villain Malcolm Coles was being let go from the paper. Coles responded by demanding we take our story down, telling us it was “untrue” and “defamatory” and cc’ing his lawyer into his email to this site. Today, six days later, Coles has confirmed he is out:
“We did some good stuff over the last two years. And we also did football emoji scores. I wish everyone there well for 2017.”
A rare case where Telegraph hacks are pleased to see someone leave. Coles will be hoping his lawyer has better success getting him some redundancy cash…
On Monday morning, a rumour went round the Telegraph newsroom that Malcolm Coles, the paper’s notorious digital guru, is being let go. Coles won’t give Guido an answer other than to say he hasn’t left yet. Multiple Telegraph sources say he has been given his notice. This is the digital revolution eating its children, it would be a harsh decision given bosses allowed Coles to bear the brunt of criticism for the dumbing down of content. Coles was brought in to oversee all the naff viral content and SEO optimisation that executives wanted and journalists and readers hated. It’s a marker of how the Telegraph do things these days that Coles’ colleagues have had to whisper to each other speculation about his demise…
The video above shows Telegraph digital guru and “SEO consultant” Malcolm Coles speaking at the Brighton Search Engine Optimisation Conference last week. Coles admits – even boasts – that he has deliberately diminished the Telegraph’s brand in the pursuit of clicks from Google searches. It is what Telegraph readers and writers have long suspected, but it’s quite something for the loathed Coles to say it on camera:
Coles: “Click through rate is another important thing, so what we have to think about is a good headline.”
[The headline “Bow down to Kate Middleton’s new baby” comes up on the screen]
Coles: “This is a terrible headline for the Daily Telegraph, which is a quality news organisation. But it was amazing! It shot to the top of Google! And stayed there for ages… It’s not great from a brand point of view, but from a click though rate… getting these slightly quirky headlines in the news box means they tend to stay there for quite a long time”
Coles goes on to explain that the Telegraph has published a staggering 13,000 of those annoying “What time is?” articles, another trick to boost your Google juice. A newsroom veteran who watched Coles’ speech tells Guido:
“We’d always assumed Coles and [editor, Chris] Evans were blind to the damage they were our doing our newspaper in the desperate pursuit of numbers. Now we know it was a deliberate strategy.”
The video has gone down like a cup of cold sick in the newsroom…
