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…

"We put aside existing notions about news apps and imagined what our journalism would be if it lived natively on your iPhone. It wouldn’t be a facsimile of our website. It would be something entirely different, with original writing, new features, and a fresh interface."... The Quartz news app isn't for everybody ... the app is by design unlikely…

... manually curate 10 stories from other publishers, which will run as a daily edition. Three different articles, often with opposing viewpoints, will run on each story, representing the left, neutral and right-wing political perspectives on the same story... For example, in Wednesday’s edition, it ran a Guardian story entitled “Terrorism publ…

But it's possible to build tools designed to connect real experts in government, business and the media in a way that generates valuable insight for the rest of us. From our own experience developing Sidewire, a social communications platform, we know there is an appetite for expert political analysis and insight that helps sort fact from fiction …

The afternoon session at Future Media Lab 2016 showed that while European media are warming to the idea of using advanced language technologies to share content across borders, their audiences are already well ahead of them.

a big part of Twitter’s current problems stem from choosing to mimic Facebook’s ad-supported, most-eyeballs-possible business model,... forced Twitter to focus on money making strategies that irritate users... becoming more open was also a socially valuable goal, not just an economic one... Instead of becoming more open, however, Twitter turned in…

“We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task... Physicist Stephen Hawking and the tech billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk issued a similar warning last year... Vardi, a professor at Rice University and Guggenheim fellow... suggested AI could drive global unemployment to 50%, wiping out middle-…

It is inevitable that Twitter will need to create some scarce, attention-rich inventory it can sell to advertisers

Facebook’s Notes feature is giving The Boston Globe another way to post directly to the Facebook platform... Notes, an early Facebook staple, stagnated for years until last September, when Facebook updated the feature with a cleaner, more customizable design and editing tool reminiscent of Medium. Unlike video posted directly to Facebook, there’s…

But cracks in Twitter’s façade had been showing already... getting noisy isn’t the only problem Twitter has today, though it seems to be one of the more pronounced symptoms of a company that has lost its direction.

Betts ... became the first data head to join the publisher’s board, recognizing data’s importance in growing its subscriptions and audience. Today, he heads up a 30-person team focused on customer analytics and research. Here are lessons from Betts on data maturity and driving audience engagement... While subscriptions are critical ... it’s not t…

For some news organisations, packaging and distributing news on social media falls under the remit of the engagement team. For others, the task is assigned to a distributed news team or to a social content studio within the editorial department.This is the third in a series of articles on how news for social is produced... BuzzFeed Distributed i…

Sure Facebook has 1.59 billion users, but that not my field of view. I have some 900 “friends” on Facebook. To me, it doesn’t matter who the other one billion five hundred eighty-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand one hundred users are. I can’t reach out to them to begin a relationship... Facebook and Twitter are two very different dif…

The new feature will show tweets that are sorted based on relevancy, rather than only chronology, at the top of your timeline... "While you were away," is still reserved to recap tweets when you've gone significant stretches of time between browsing sessions and may not always appear at the very top of your timeline. The new "best tweets first" f…