from a locked-down Brussels to a grieving Paris to a refugee camp in Greece, Henry Porter reports on the European Union’s existential crisis.

2015 MARKED PROPUBLICA’S most ambitious year to date in visual and interactive storytelling...here are some highlights from the year that was.

Facebook’s news feed algorithm can be tweaked to make us happy or sad; it can expose us to new and challenging ideas or insulate us in ideological bubbles... The algorithm’s rankings correspond to the user’s preferences “sometimes,” Facebook acknowledges... not the success rate you might expect A glimpse into its inner workings sheds light ... on…

“print dollars have turned into digital dimes, which are turning into mobile pennies.” Basically, even as we consume more news than ever, thanks to mobile’s proliferation, the revenue streams are actually diminishing... Where’s the money going to then, you ask? To Facebook, Google, and Twitter, the winners on mobile...As publishers turn more and …

For the US daily newspaper sector over the past decade, weekday circulation has fallen 17 percent and ad revenue more than 50 percent ... a key for the industry is changing the culture of newsrooms to foster innovation. This includes allowing interaction of different groups—journalists, technicians and others which the study referred to as "tribes…

Peak Content, the point at which this glut of things to read, watch and listen to becomes completely unsustainable. There hasn’t been enough ad revenue to sustain it for years ... 2016 will mark the beginning of a shake out...winning ad dollars is becoming more of a zero-sum game, and the winners appear to be the mobile-first digital advertisers l…

Facebook already accounts for a huge proportion of the web traffic to major media sites. And publishers are rushing even further into its embrace because they have no choice and can’t think of a better option... ad blocking is taking care of what’s left of the media’s ambitions to continue as standalone entities... there are rays of hope in the …

Consumers have difficulty distinguishing between native advertising and editorial content, according to a new study by researchers at Grady College ... only 17 out of 242 subjects -- under 8% -- were able to identify native advertising as a paid marketing message in this experiment... Just 18.3% identified native ads as paid messages in the secon…

competition in the ride-hailing market is really just the prelude to a much bigger fight over dominance of the self-driving car market over the next couple of decades... If cars are primarily rented, rather than owned, then they can be optimized for shorter trips ... Short-range, high-efficiency electric vehicles will become more practical. -…

Media heads towards 'winner take all' landscape: “You don’t want to be a second- or third-tier partner."

I just want to share a few of my favorite cultural things from 2015, especially from film, literature, television, music and podcasts.

The extremist adherents of this new political correctness have essentially taken a flamethrower to the public space and annihilated its center. Topics in American life that once were the legitimate subjects of debate between liberals and conservative are now off-limits and lead to immediate attack by the cultural establishment if raised at all. An…

The CDO is now a “transformer in chief,” charged with coordinating and managing comprehensive changes that address everything from updating how a company works to building out entirely new businesses.

companies that have successfully transitioned to become high-performing digital enterprises are able to orchestrate six building blocks: strategy and innovation, the customer decision journey, process automation, organization, technology, and data and analytics

A brand is a unique set of associations in the mind of a customer... Mention a luxury brand like Rolex and the associations that spring to mind are likely to include wealth, prestige, status, craftsmanship, heritage, exploration. Whatever your take on someone who sports a $30,000 Daytona, it’s probably going to be different from what you think whe…

Publishers like the New York Times should be having an existential crisis over Facebook’s instant articles. Instead they’re embracing them.. digital content is being divided between a lucrative high-end entertainment world,... and a low-end publishing world where content is expected to be “free,” ... a model that... might work to BuzzFeed’s adv…

2015 is the Year of the Card. Screen-size cards are everywhere, from websites to native apps and are designed to look like their physical counterparts. It’s an easy way for you to shuffle through a series of digital containers with the flick of a thumb...cards are a style that seems just made for apps.

IS IT boom or doom in the news business? Headline-grabbing sums are being invested in online newspapers... Yet for those publications founded in the era of hot-metal type, advertising revenues continue to fall... American dailies lost around $30 billion in ad spending between 2005 and 2014, or 60% of the total... the main hope is to find ways of b…

The world-renowned specialist of Islam and the geo-politics of the Middle East has developed a “third way” of understanding the new globalized jihadism. He believes the underlying cause is a deep generational fracture that has sparked an international jihadi movement from France to Tunisia, and Turkey to Saudi Arabia.

As Jeffrey Goldberg just tweeted, "Donald Trump is now an actual threat to national security"... we will be changing how we cover him at The Huffington Post. Back in July, we announced our decision to put our coverage of Trump's presidential campaign in our Entertainment section ... "Trump's campaign is a sideshow."Since then Trump's campaign …

we want to create use cases for people with limited time available to explore news stories on the mobile ... challenge is to provide the news in a quick, snappy format while also providing the opportunity to deepen their understanding when needed. As well as providing summaries and deeper information we feel this approach could lead to news bec…

full rollout in those markets, and elsewhere in Europe, is slated for “early 2016”.) Upday sounds as if it will be aggregating a variety of editorial content based on contextual signals available via mobile — such as user location and interests. UPDAY will offer Samsung customers access to a range of news content that combines ‘Need to Know’ in…

society had a pretty straightforward system of rewards: you give us something of value, and we’ll heap praise on you. It’s a fair trade ... that most social media gurus ... are unwilling to make ... insist on trying to “hack” the system... sheer laziness... shortcuts to notoriety rather than slowly, painstakingly, lovingly crafting something of va…

Attacks by Islamic militants, unjustified arrests, assaults, harassment, threats and tougher legal restrictions made it harder for editors, reporters and photographers to hold the powerful to account across the region this year, according to media organizations and NGOs.Hopes that politicians would increase protections for independent media after …

In the last post, we saw 15 different ways you can instantly boost your email open and read rates today.We looked at how you can be play ethical, use hypnotic words, create a stellar autoresponder list and a personalized welcome message, among other things.Here are 16 more ways to make sure your emails are opened and to boost your click-through ra…

the power of Facebook’s algorithmic News Feed... doesn’t show users everything their friends post, and so Facebook can demand a toll from publishers for placement in the stream. Today that toll looks like simply programming content to the algorithm, tomorrow it looks like publishing Instant Articles, and maybe next year it looks like paying Facebo…

If there’s anything that goes some way to explaining Trump’s popularity in the midst of his quasi-fascistic views that reached a nadir with his call to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, it is his social media prowess. Trump has more than 5.5 million Twitter followers and 4.5 million Facebook fans. He has a presence across YouTube, V…

To feel most joyful and satisfied, you need to not only accomplish certain priority items but also prioritize certain experiences of time... Here’s how to reclaim your desired experiences of time ... make it a rule to have at least 15 minutes between meetings to wrap up your notes, get a drink of water, and have a moment to breathe... you’ll end u…

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