"a new media startup aims to bring the ProPublica approach abroad, creating Germany’s first nonprofit investigative news organization... completely focused on data journalism... The team intends to compile and share large datasets that map people in power to the money behind them, collaborating with local open data organizations as well as other n…

"the Orange is the New Black-inspired content series on women inmates in America cracked the top 10 most read articles on the site, with fifty percent of its traffic coming from social media and 60 percent from mobile. ... time spent ... rivaled time spent with the top New York Times editorial. “ - New York Times adman gushes over native advertis…

"When asked to pay for well-reported news content, there’s a growing swell of readers who understand the value and are willing to invest in it. ... We’re seeing a renewed, if still small, consumer commitment to funding journalism ... these models are developing outside the United States... there is relatively little European foundation support…

" News cooperatives have long thrived in Europe ... and Mexico. Yet, with a few exceptions they never really took root in the U.S. That may be changing. " - Kickstarter Bets On Bringing The Slow Europe Model Of Journalism To The U.S. | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

For those still confused: "Content marketing is not PR as such... But there is a basic realization that people are tired of ads and having promotional messages pushed on them. So called “branded journalism” is ... often compelling high-quality content that many newspaper editors would wish their journalists could produce.... brands seem sometimes …

Part 2 of my second weekly roundup, where the overriding theme is innovation.

@baekdal explores "a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry ... based on a business model that used to work in the old days of media, but was as a result of scarcity." Newspapers, he argues, are "the supermarket of news ... [but] upermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do... But on the internet, e…

Good piece from @digitaltonto pointing out that "data journalism ... falls short when confronted with complexity and nuance... Traditional journalists could benefit from more data literacy and objective analysis, while data journalism would be much improved by real world context. Unfortunately, little integration has occurred. Traditional journa…

"publishers like the Economist Group are still trying to get their salespeople on board with a way of selling that they're either confused by or outright hostile to - so hostile, in fact, that some buyers have encountered salespeople who have actively tried to talk them out of programmatic sales." - How the Economist Group is retooling for prog…

The NYT's "Snowfall" of native advertising. Great quality. Still don't like native advertising.

... We are statistically closer to the next recession than to the last one, and another year or two of double-digit ad declines will push many papers into 3-day printing schedules, or bankruptcy, or both. " Clay Shirky giving it straight. What will the world be like in 5 years time? - Nostalgia and Newspapers, Clay Shirky

"an interesting glimpse at the technology responsible for publishing 700 articles, 600 images, 14 slideshows, and 50 videos on a daily basis." I find the article fascinating because of what the CMS is not - it: "does not render our website or provide community tools to our readers. Rather, it is a system for managing content and publishing d…

The implications for CMS and responsive design of these "three key points to consider for adaptive storytelling" are potentially huge. - Advice for 'adaptive storytelling' from the Washington Post | Media news

One for @richardmedic ... "Smydra ... he wants to find a way to allow the public to benefit from all the knowledge of future news events locked up inside newsrooms.... He'd love your thoughts" - Can you turn future news events into structured data? » Nieman Journalism Lab

"With the launch of new site after new site in 2014, it's been a fascinating time to watch digital media try to figure itself out. Amid the turmoil of disruption, buffeted by tech companies' control over information distribution, but aware of new fields of possibility, the past few years were filled with defending legacy brands. So this new round…

New report ”examines the current state of data journalism... calling for more transparency on how data is collected and used in journalism, anticipating an explosion in news apps as a way of producing information, and ways newsrooms can address security around their data and reporting. " In particular, I love this: "...the advice that newsroom le…

"We explain the European court of justice ruling saying that Google will have to delete some information from its index – and why it has divided opinion" Good example of explainer journalism, and of how answering the comments often looks like more work than writing the thing in the first place (if you don't believe me, scan the comments): - Expl…

"there are themes that may be more broadly applicable than scanning the headlines might make you believe.... ... report defines audience development as "the work of expanding our loyal and engaged audience," ... While this is a central role for the newsroom, audience development is the responsibility of every individual... ... another important …

"it is the innovation report which needs to be read cover to cover by anyone whose work includes a digital media component. "

More titbits from that internal NYT digital report: "There are about 14.7 million articles in the Times’ archives back to 1851 ... We can be both a daily newsletter and a library — offering news every day, as well as providing context, relevance and timeless works of journalism.” " - The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key d…

"The New York Times lost 80 million homepage visitors—half the traffic to the nytimes.com page—in two years.... this will make the news more about readers ...[because] homepages reflect the values of institutions, and Facebook and Twitter reflect the interest of individual readers [who] aren't interested in hard news, but rather entertainment, se…

"... technical weaknesses in the paper’s backend: The lack of an organized system of tags to organize stories’ metadata ..."

Deadtree media to do more with legacy content than paper birdcages! The latest high-profile move into explanatory journalism is New York Times' The Upshot: "offer a combination of data journalism and explanatory reporting ... head-to-head with Ezra Klein’s Vox and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight ... a kind of internal aggregator and explainer for…

Reflecting Shirky's (pre-Twitter) observations about reciprocity, social media and traditional media, Slate reframes how to view Twitter. Worth a read: "Twitter is not a social network. Not primarily, anyway. It’s better described as a social media platform, with the emphasis on “media platform... Social networks connect people with one another…

And not just journalists. New generation news sites are redefining news and, by consequence, rethinking information architecture, content strategy and CMS. I only hope the results filter through to everyone else, and sooner rather than later. "... a moment when young talent began demanding superior technology as the key to producing superior jour…

A new generation of companies, like CIRCA, are redefining the structure of how information is treated, and building new CMS to support it. Their approach will inevitably feed into a new generation of CMS for whom the 'article' and 'page' are, if not meaningless, at least optional. And I for one can't wait. "what we’re really doing at Circa is a…

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

"data-driven journalism doesn’t simply strive to contribute to public policy and culture debates, it aims to end them with a decisive answer. ... In Actually Journalism, news and opinion aren’t needed; to understand something, all the audience needs is this fact, this piece of data, this answer... [but] if Actually Journalism can’t find a way to e…

Great perspective from Ben Thompson on how today's internet flips the bell curve into a power curve, and what that means for anyone producing content which is not best-of-breed: "The implication of news consumption being dominated by the tall skinny part of the power curve is that those who can regularly appear there – the best of the best – are …

A tour of upcoming innovations in "Explanatory journalism... will play a larger role in the digital media landscape ..." illustrate a wider trend: “... content-centric start-ups getting funded. ... web and mobile publishing platforms still present new opportunities for new entrance, new publishers, new journalists, new publications...” - 'FiveTh…