“Jobs” is in the top five highest ranking categories of interest to people in Australia according to the Editor of leading news, business and entertainment site news.com.au David Higgins.

Speaking to a breakfast audience of public relations professionals hosted by Galaxy Research, Mr Higgins explained how news in the digital age would have to become a lot more “useful”.

While journalists have been obsessed with the big political stories and topics like crime, the development of online media was forcing a big change in the thinking of news editors.

Mr Higgins said the job of the news editor is to constantly monitor the clicks going to a particular topic or story, which had allowed the audience to dictate the news agenda.

“Journalists today have to be concerned with UBs (unique browsers), PIs (page impressions), session durations (how long the reader spends looking at a story), Search Engine Optimisation and the blogosphere,” he said.

All this enabled news organisation to know exactly what their users (readers) were interested in.

For example, the topics of most interest in 2010 to the massive online audience across News Ltd websites were the cost of living, interest rates, job security, housing affordability, body image and education statistics.

Mr Higgins added that digital journalists must be commercially mindful without compromising the quality of the information offered to audiences. He said this included directing traffic to sponsored areas or promoting their own areas of a site – be that news or entertainment – through their own social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Pitching stories directly to web news teams was still difficult Mr Higgins said. Journalists were so busy “building content” – posting stories, connecting links, creating photo galleries and adding video – that most of content they created was taken from wire services or newspaper teams. Newspaper journalists now file stories throughout the day to web editors.

CareerOne.com.au’s own Editorial team has provided content directly to news.com.au particularly the Business section. Contributions have included employment commentary provided by many of our recruiters. 

Blogs are another way to contribute to the news machine. Recently Rabieh Krayem, CEO, IPA Recruitment and Adelaide-based recruitment consultant Robert Godden both posted comments on the news.com.au hosted blog written by CareerOne’s Editor.

Information must always be of genuine news value and be of genuine use to the audience of users.

In 2010 the hot employment topics will include job security, salary trends, the growing skill shortage, the casualisation of the Australian labour force, career change, the changes to industrial relations under the Fair Work Act and candidate power.