the Guardian is a great newspaper whose survival should concern us all... Digital revenues, which had been predicted to increase to £100m in the current financial year, are stuck at around £80m, while advertising print revenues have declined by about 20 per cent... Nor could anyone dispute that the Guardian’s website has been highly successful. I…

ProPublica, for example, has always encouraged others to “steal its stories” — which has both increased pageviews and resulted in thousands of sites reprinting their pieces. I see Creative Commons licensing as a smart way to distribute local or national content when the goal is maximum impact... [and] as an important survival tool for smaller an…

The module formerly known as Watching is linking out less than it used to, but the Times says it still believes in curating... we are just trying to figure out the right balance between New York Times stories and outside sources; how to offer smart, meaningful curation to our readers.

Search engines, social media and news aggregators are great at surfacing information close to our interests, but they are limited by the set of topics and people we choose to follow. Even if we read multiple news sources every day, what we discover is defined by the languages we are able to read, and the topics that our sources decide to cover. Ul…

But how did Belgium find itself at the center of a burgeoning terrorist network? Here are a few sources of reading to help you get a clearer picture.

It's not just science reporters who need to evaluate research and learn to tell good studies from bad... perhaps the biggest challenge facing today’s science journalists: Evaluating and interpreting complex and sometimes contradictory results at a time when so many news stories... rely on a fairly sophisticated understanding of science. That make…

she and her team record real audio and motion capture data, then work it into a digital recreation of an event. It's an unusual technique that lets people not just see an event, but explore it.

Snapchat on Thursday launched a new political campaign show on its “Discover” page... ‘Good Luck America’ is geared toward young viewers

Here are three ways to step your game up right now.

News is a product... our news products must be good and targeted to succeed. They must know who their users are, what they need, how they need it, and deliver a satisfying experience. That is what a product manager does... thinking about what users ... need from the whole of that product; what their experience of it is like; how it could be more c…

could pose a devastating threat to large tranches of the financial industry, and profoundly change the management of monetary policy... RSCoin would be a tool of state control, allowing the central bank to keep a tight grip on the money supply and respond to crises. It would erode the exorbitant privilege of commercial banks of creating money out …

Email, for all the claims of it being dead, is critical for many publishers as a distribution (and marketing) channel they continue to control... Email newsletters have become an important part of publishers’ audience development strategies as a way to deepen their relationship with readers by providing an antidote to the endless stream of news in…

AI still can’t ... deal with natural language well enough, but it’s getting much better. And the way translation’s currently done will change because Google now has what promises to be a much better way to do machine translation.

the rise of Trump using language of how we talk about startups that become black swans.

The potential outcomes are bad for the party and its adherents—but even worse for the rest of America.

The main Topics this time are language technology, mobile innovation and EU communications, with a few extras to catch-up since the last edition.

The New York Times smartphone products now have redefined Page One for the digital era. Finally, we have a model. Mobile can be harnessed to share the day’s news, and works far better to keep us informed than newsprint ever could....engagement — more minutes, now especially in mobile — drives subscription sales, retention, and the ability to incre…

if all content is ranked together and swift approval is the primary metric (whether that be views, reads, or recommends), the platform will become dominated by generic bullshit. Aspirational pap is just Medium’s version of the cat meme... Publications aren’t communities. Tags aren’t communities. They are content ownership vehicles and search tools…

the way Snapchat works is much closer to how we communicate face to face than any other social network... So now that you know everything there is to know about the history of the platform, let’s get down to the most important part: how the fuck do you use this thing? ... Below are some handy guides I have put together...

As a believer in the 80/20 principle, whenever I list out the key players involved in deciding on any piece of EU law, I come to around 500 men and women across Europe. Over time, around 100 of them are more heavily involved and influential, and the vital decisions are taken by about 20...

To understand what makes BuzzFeed tick, you need to know how Dao Nguyen thinks about data... As the value of content approaches zero, "Having technology, data science, and being able to know how to manage, optimize and coordinate your publishing is the thing that gives you a competitive advantage"... One myth is data scientists are telling report…

To get a better grip on the questions that bots raise... organized a workshop that brought together a diverse group of bot experts. This article is the output of the event, a tour of the bot and its semi-autonomy from three perspectives: that of the designer, the implementer, and the regulator... The last several years have seen a rise in bots …

BotOrNot checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.

sometimes people post disagreeable or disturbing content that does not violate Facebook's policies. This paper explores the potential of community-driven counter-speech to play a critical role in challenging and diminishing these type of posts on social media. Counter-speech is a common, crowd-sourced response to extremism or hateful content... F…

Berners-Lee suggested a simple rethink in how social networks and human nature work together could help curtail negative behaviour... "we have responsibility to think how to build systems that tend to produce constructive criticism and harmony as opposed to negativity and bullying."

everything one needs to know about ... the Google Analytics add-on for Google Sheets.... value-add to a reporting workflow is that it’s extremely flexible, reliable, and a real time-saver... allows you to: Pull any data that you’d be able to access in the Analytics API (i.e analytics.google.com) directly into a spreadsheet...

Google’s self-driving cars are logging some 15,000 autonomous miles per week on public streets...a fatal accident will eventually happen. And a fatal accident could doom the entire effort. How the public responds to the first human deaths caused by self-driving cars will ultimately determine the technology’s trajectory... self-driving cars end up…

the press help shed sunlight on the inner workings of government, expose flaws and problems in our system, and inform the citizenry, making journalism a cornerstone of a healthy democracy... explanatory journalism... is particularly worthy of attention for its role in improving public knowledge and contributing to a more informed populace.The vide…

I've been invited to prepare a "Technology Buyer Challenge" on Hashtag Platform for the Language Technology Industry Summit this May. (Update, 31/3/16: this project was covered, among many other things, in an interview with professional EU interpreter Alexander Drechsel in his podcast Demos ex machina? Multilingual communication wit…

[leaders are] usually busy furiously making believe that there is no decline. Instead of leading societies out of decline (which is what they should be doing), they’re working night and day manufacturing (or luxuriously reclining in) what I’ll call Unreality Bubbles... intelligentsias manufacture unrealities in eras of decline because their positi…