Others have written on the return of the enewsletter, but I don't think anyone saw it as the home page: "Yes, the homepage is still dead, which is why our new front door is quite different from most. ... we are offering an efficient briefing on global business news, ... intended to be read straight through, like a well written memo from a trusted…

"There's no clickbait, there's no fluff, no listicles... just articles." Apparently the new app "scours the Internet for content published by both news outlets and writers..." - but until they launch the Android & Web app (underway) I won't know if it involves semantic analysis... But: "the [article] publishers ... will get pageviews, as art…

"Few pieces of journalism — let alone narrative journalism — effect change in a matter of hours. But that’s what happened with “Working Anything but 9 to 5,” ... A rare combination of intimate narrative and exposé, Kantor’s Aug. 13 story followed a tumultuous month in the life of Jannette Navarro, a young single mother struggling to make ends me…

It wasn't supposed to be this way... "The internet is ballooning with fluff, and bad content marketing is to blame. In our obsession with "engaging" our "audience" in "real-time" with "targeted content" that goes "viral," we are driving people insane... Although word on the street is that people want short, “snackable” content, the data says…

"There has been a lot of discussion lately about long-form content and how it is changing the content marketing playbook.... Is long-form content really worth the extra effort? It seems that way. SERPIQ recently completed an analysis of the top 10 search results for more than 20,000 keywords and revealed a surprising pattern. The length of cont…

These figures need to be compared with other research shows that people seem happy to consume long articles on their mobiles. "Ad Age looked at ... Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger to see how their traffic has changed over the last year and what effect [mobile] has had on the time people spend with each service...." On the one hand we read about the …

"the data say longer form media is moving slowly across the social networks of distribution... two opposing trends going on simultaneously. On one end of the curve rabid sharing is driving an attention cycle of seconds but on the other end people are reading and watching more.... The social web has flattened web sites and made the home page…

"The original converted 7.6% better than the new variation... The leads from the long form version of the page were better in quality ... in most cases long form copy doesn't just boost your conversions, but it also increases your rankings too." Indepth and (inevitably) long analysis. Huge feedback. - How Content Length Affects Rankings and…

"Readers want short, snappy content, ideally under 140 characters or at most a list, right? Well, actually, wrong.... 7 recent studies: long form content is alive, thriving and driving high levels of content performance." Full article summarises 7 more, so I won't summarise it here - read it yourself: - Improve Your Content Marketing with Long …

Sometimes long form content helps with conversions, and sometimes it hurts, and sometimes, long form content is better for SEO, but other times it’s worse" Read the full article to understand why ... and how, and when. Key point: " the best long form content marketing doesn’t make one feel like they’re being marketed to...." - Why Long Form Cont…

Fascinating article in Issue 14 (theme: Evolution): "It is a case of convergent evolution—where different species separately developed similar biological adaptations when faced with the same environmental pressures. Salamanders are Wake’s go-to example when asked a decades-old question in evolutionary biology: If you could replay the “tape of lif…

Great example of modern US longform content from Vox, where they use a specific style to link to one of their 'content cards'. Plus a killer quote on the 'blame Brussels' syndrome: "... banks that owned eurozone government debt were saved, and so were institutions around the world ... Meanwhile, politicians got to take credit for keeping their c…

"The real question isn't why we don't read anymore, it's why we comment—passionately and with the utmost confidence—after reading only a headline. " - NPR Pulled a Brilliant April Fools' Prank On People Who Don't Read

One of the reasons I created this Tumblr was to use it as a 'first draft’ of a Content Hub (see post), an idea which crystallised after reading Sloan’s original content strategy piece on Stock and Flow.The Hub is basically my way of saying that there’s more to life than the Stream. Unsurprisingly, Alexis Madrigal’s piece in the Atlantic caugh…

“There is a huge audience of readers out there craving this kind of storytelling ... With phones and tablets, they now always have a reading device available on them to dig into something.”