Big Media Sites Learning About SEO?

• MSNBC Just Now Being SEO’d?

• 
  Forbes hires an SEO firm - I can't imagine why they would want to announce that. Just look at the ThreadWatch Forbes.com review.

• Fox News discovers other channels may be biased - gasp, shock, horror, etc.

It will be interesting to see what happens to search business models as more people realize some links are paid, while some sites rank due to algorithm manipulation, and others are there due to spyware.

As more and more big players get into the SEO field doing things like

• focusing on a niche

• creating unique ideas and products
• being the first with the news
• finding ways to make people want to talk about you (as Peter D mentioned here)

will become increasingly important.

Of course some of the big players suffer from their size. Due to it's past walled garden approach AOL has become so irrelevant that they may only account for a few perecent of Google's profits, and yet companies like the New York Times are hiding away more and more of their content.

I recently spoke with one journalist who after about an hour of chatting said that he thought SEO sounded more interesting than journalism. I will be interviewing a former journalist who is an SEO guru soon.