Overview: Communications Strategy

Most people in the news industry hate comments.... yet audience engagement ... is so worth the investment ... trust in media and journalists has sunk to a new low. Talking to each other can help build relationships and therefore trust. What business leader out there doesn’t want to earn more per user? And what journalist doesn’t want to have the b…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Major enterprise stories — stories that take deep dives and attempt to inform readers in substantive ways or to elicit impact... require considerable resources... the potential audience is limited... how can journalists get readers to complete these long pieces?use multiple elements and platforms to tell the story... the parts that pull your reade…

Propaganda warfare is increasingly shaping narratives, policies and lives around the world.

these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy... We’ve monitored more than 7,000 social media accounts over the last 30 months and at times engaged directly with them. Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s social media and hacking …

the evidence of this orchestrated Russian intelligence effort to hack the outcome of the American election... seems flimsy at best... saying is that Russia took advantage of the social web’s desire to just share things without reading them. It may be true, but so does every other media outlet.

Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood...two people together can mutua…

Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. ... very like being in the Matrix but with less kung fu and more Polly Toynbee and Nigel Farage... here are a few of the things I’ve learned…

Let’s take a break from the Donald, Facebook and the end of democracy, and try to focus on what’s important.

Their job is to navigate the world of information, help scholars and students get what they need, and distinguish good information from bad. They’ve faced their own technological disruptions, and have responded by developing a set of principles to help their public assess the credibility of information and use it ethically. They call this framewor…

Raising Barriers... took readers to eight countries across three continents and examined the divisions between countries and peoples through interwoven words, video and sound... we used every multimedia tool in our arsenal. Here’s what we learned from the experience

hierarchy of good writing, particularly of good science writing... Explainers make information clear and comprehensible... Elucidators go beyond explanation and into illumination — they transmute information into understanding by ... integrating various bits of knowledge into a larger framework of comprehension... Enchanters do all of the above, b…

I finally vlogged my first event. Some first impressions.

where curated broadcast channels shine and it’s easier than ever to search for live videos

people comment 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos... we wanted to highlight some of the recent trends and themes we’ve seen emerge... Local reporters often have devoted fans who are interested in viewing their authentic Facebook Live content. Certain news content resonates...

This updates both my earlier Taming the Firehose and Where is social media taking you in 2016? posts, and better aligns my productivity process with my personal content strategy.

using Facebook to repackage some of its magazine stories into video form... takes advantage of a Facebook tool that lets publishers merge a series of photos into videos... kept things simple... roughly 30 seconds and rarely going beyond a few words, a chart, or a photo in each individual slide... take as little as two minutes

A content marketing framework... allows you to develop a process that can be duplicated... repeatable framework for any type of content to be better utilized... incorporate goal setting at the beginning... an understanding from goal setting to how you’re going to put that into a strategy ... Once you publish ... get feedback and optimize the conte…

Reaching consensus with groups larger than 5 people on any other platform or service is a pain. Discuto helps you get everyone on the same page.Discuto highlights controversies and suggests where to dive in the conversation, making the decision process easier to manage. What's more is that it only takes a few seconds to set up your first discussio…

two products, Springboard and Time Inc. Connect to help editors source content from contributors, some for traditional editorial content and some for native or branded content... a way for editors to create more content around specific topics or events rather than just getting content on the cheap... gathering ... people with some degree of social…

Far from disappearing, human curation and sensibilities have a new value in the age of algorithms... Facebook is mired in a series of controversies about the curation of its news feed... recently tried to smooth the process out by firing its human editors … only to find the news feed degenerated into a mass of fake and controversial news stories.…

To try and focus on all our energy to bring new readers to site as opposed to serving loyal readers began to feel like the wrong way to look at it… identified a set of metrics that stand for loyalty ... created content people wanted to come back for on the regular. So far, it’s delivering: site traffic is up 31 percent... People who come 25 times…

Each issue is conceived around a single topic ... with a new cluster of pieces, grouped together as chapters, published each Thursday.... To supplement ... Facts So Romantic, a blog updated closer to daily Another against-the-grain move: Its print magazine collects the best of the magazine’s web content... printed on high-quality paper and desi…

they’re not the game-changer he thought they’d be... We have to stop trying to find a single problem. It needs to be solved in a million different ways, every single day.

The CIA wants to make sure that the privacy rights of this fictional character aren’t violated.

when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

at The Information, the subscription-based tech news publisher, comments and community aren’t just intact — they’re a selling point... The Information puts its members front and center. Subscribers get their own bio pages... its subscription call to action entreats visitors not to get access to great information or level up their tech and media k…

‘Ask’ enables editors to create embeddable forms to invite contributions from readers. These could come in several formats, including text, photo, video, audio. The contributions can be (optionally) linked to existing user profiles. Editors can filter, sort, share, and manage the contributions, and then display the best ones in a gallery.

This new tool shows users what Facebook determines are their interests... has provided a glance into the deep flaws of Facebook’s interest targeting. Advertisers should be concerned about where their dollars are going... Here are the main flaws I came across:... I would just recommend approaching targeting differently:

quality filter setting ... can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior... filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follo…