building community means intentionally creating a culture, every step of the way... It’s hard to overstate the importance of community guidelines... members ... didn’t want to be a part of a community where people were fighting all the time, but had been afraid to speak up in the discussion, lest they get dragged into the fray. with every post, e…

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? ... his support seems to cross demographic lines ... does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast o…

“In 40 years,” Morton added, “as many people will believe a bunch of Arabs knocked down the World Trade Center as will believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”

As newsrooms disappear, veteran reporters are being forced from the profession. That’s bad for journalism—and democracy...  In 2007, there were 55,000 full-time journalists at nearly 1,400 daily papers; in 2015, there were 32,900,..  doesn’t include the buyouts and layoffs last fall...  what remains of print journalism is shifting, morphing i…

many marketers spend their resources on talking at people, not listening. The key is to find the space between what you want to talk about as a marketer and what they want to talk about as a consumer. That small slice is the opportunity for true engagement and will shift the conversation from monologue to dialogue. Attention is a gift, and what yo…

companies made huge bets on branded content... to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers... invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. Digital crowds now serve as very effective an…

Enter the new editors of the Internet: giant, centralized tech companies that have created platforms... notably Facebook and Apple — want to be the newsstands of tomorrow: the place we go, inside their own ecosystems, to get our news and information... journalism organizations feel they have no alternative but to be part of those ecosystems. This …

Times are tough for Web publishers... The common threats facing the industry have made partnering up with competitors an easier sell. This collaboration has taken many forms...

It’s tempting to merely argue that the recent crop of newsletters are what came to replace the independent blogosphere of the mid-aughts.... take a look at the subject lines for several of the newsletters ... Any web editor who plugged these as headlines into a CMS would be summarily fired... why are readers responding so well when they fly in th…

"AMP is not just about news and not just about articles" ... going forward, the focus will be on new creative ad experiences... highly compelling interactive experiences within the format ... this needs to be easy to implement ... seen a lot of organizations with small engineering teams implement this into their homegrown CMSes within a few days…

Despite ... the belief of many publishers that online ad revenue would surely replace offline, the per-view price of a digital ad continues to drop, and ever-more ad dollars are concentrated with Google and Facebook. Now, to boot, there are ad blockers... paywalls as an alternative revenue stream has, other than for a few must-have titles, produce…

seen as its answer to the walled garden of Facebook’s Instant Articles... in tests, AMP pages loaded 85 percent faster than regular Web pages... We know faster pages are going to do better in mobile search; why would we not do everything we can do make it faster?”

the future of work will rely on self-organization, enabled by collaborative software like Slack and Ethereum... Even in a self-organized, decentralized, collaborative, and high-trust future ... people will need to navigate their organization... Roles and projects will need to be created, filled, and disbanded with increasing frequency... we need …

Instant Articles, meet Instant Ads... an immersive way to reach people without making them leave the social network... when users click a Facebook News Feed ad connected to Canvas, it opens a full-screen, rich media page inside of Facebook rather than forcing users to wait for a mobile website to load... removes constraints that low-power mobile s…

My sadly underwhelmed response to @sidewireinc’s gr8 “Today’s Internet is Optimized for Noise”

What’s the difference between customization and personalization? - Customization: The visitor deliberately chooses between options designed to make the user experience more personal.- Personalization: The visitor is automatically shown personalized pages based on anticipated needs / wants.

in the new news business that old saw is getting flipped: messaging is the new medium... Readers are fatigued by apps... overwhelmed by the torrents pushed out on social networks. What newsrooms ... are realizing is that the place to reach readers these days are messaging apps... already reach more than 2 billion people worldwide

top 100 stories of the year, ranked ... by the total length of time people spent reading them... We wanted to see what cross-over this list might have with the biggest New York Times stories on Facebook... We recorded 28 stories in both top 100 lists...36 of the top 100 most shared stories were from the editorial and opinion pages, far more than a…

Axel Springer, wary of being overly dependent on third-party platforms for traffic... fighting back by launching its own news aggregator platform... now has around 1,200 publishers on board ... Digiday spoke with Würtenberger, CEO of Upday, about using humans and algorithms for news sourcing, creating a platform for publishers and banning ad block…

Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services... social engagement could solve the conversion challenge ... users enjoy free content that the website provides but are unwilling to contribute to the site monetarily. The bad news is that it’s not enough to just add participatory optio…

Brands have always had a tougher time spreading messages on Facebook than individuals, because they’re playing in a space that’s fundamentally not designed for them... What if our kids find the idea of any brands communicating as if they’re people even more awkward than we do? there are opportunities to re-think the role publishing plays in soci…

Asking humans to judge each other can be a surprisingly powerful thing... But invoking a sense of being watched isn’t the only way platforms subliminally encourage social behaviour... persuasive design: if you want people to do something, don’t explain why, just show them how... If extremists seek to spread fear and shock, counterspeech might aim…

Conversational UIs will also force designers to cosy up to writers, or to become more linguistically literate themselves. Information architects will be trendy again, since syntax and labels are totally their turf.

News organisations are increasingly embracing the use of analytics and metrics as part of editorial decision making, but what constitutes a sophisticated analytics strategy?... A new report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism looks at which organisations are building a competitive advantage over less advanced competitors through a…

To help developers quickly begin exploring the use of blockchain in the enterprise, IBM this week made several announcements to rapidly advance the use of distributed ledger technology across multiple industries. New blockchain services on IBM’s cloud platform, as well as plans to offer blockchain engagement centers (called Garages) in London, New…

a phone company, Three, is introducing adblocking across its network.... Mobile advertising is still a very small revenue stream for most publishers, but in many cases it is the only one showing any growth...Unless and until this is killed by the European regulators, it threatens to snuff out the lifeline of mobile advertising for digital publishe…

ThinkUp analyzes your Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook activity to give you fun and surprising insights, then emails them to you (or tweets at you if it's super interesting).

From Kickstarter’s April 2009 launch through the end of the year, 17 journalism projects received funding. That number more than tripled just a year later ... 168 funded projects in 2014 and 173 in the first nine months of 2015... from $49,256 in 2009 and $263,352 in 2010 to $1,743,668 in the first nine months of 2015... number of people contribu…

This is a completely new way to launch a media startup,... Most startups start with VC funding or a foundation grant or corporate support and then go chasing after an audience. But our crowdfunding approach means that #EmergingUS will be built on an audience of thousands... treated as real stakeholders. They'll play a big role in shaping the cont…

What if we viewed investigative reporting more broadly ... used our skills (and the financial resources of many investigative teams) to bring people together to solve problems?... The Tribune didn’t just report on what scientists were doing. We came to them with an ambitious idea, connected them to other top researchers and then became an impor…