Overview: Communications Strategy

In our new office space, we’ve created the Register Citizen Newsroom Cafe, open six days a week to bloggers, students and senior citizens as well as public and elected officials. Ordinary citizens stop by our offices nearly every day and share their news with us, sometimes over a cup of coffee in the cafe... Here we have a gallery, a cafe with cof…

The heart of differentiation therefore is your company’s ability to develop and promote distinctive products, services, and branded experiences on a consistent basis.  It’s not the output that sets you apart, but the way that everything you do supports the product and gives it context... set apart your company as a whole, instead of staking your f…

Society consists of a web of interconnected communities. A large body of research and practice exists on how to make communities work. Still, the intersection and interaction of multiple communities – the development and use of their inter-communal commons – is ill-understood. Social innovation is the process in which relevant stakeholders jointly…

imagine instead if news were a service whose aim is to help people improve their lives and communities by connecting them not only to information, but also to each other, with a commercial model built on value over volume... select communities that identify themselves as communities (that is: not fake, demographic labels like “millennials”) and th…

Just putting this up there for all those who think:a) a ‘view’ on a LinkedIn post is like a pageview on your blog or site. It’s not: it’s a ‘stream view’, a la Facebook, and does not tell you how many people actually clicked and readb) LinkedIn are consistent and care about their bloggers. They aren’t and they don’tMore: see LinkedIn Community for…

There is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to media. That has long been a fiction... It’s also dangerous to assume that the “solution” is to make sure that “both” sides of an argument are heard equally... It is even more dangerous, however, to think that relying more on algorithms will remove this bias.Recognizing bias and enabling process…

Here is an overview of how Trending Topics works:

"trending” section of Facebook... functions sort of like the front page of a newspaper...The difference comes down to a distinction in how newspapers and Facebook judge what’s important to their readers...Facebook is playing editor all the time—it’s just that we don’t recognize it, because the editorial influence takes a different form than it wou…

Leaked internal guidelines show human intervention at almost every stage of its news operation, akin to a traditional media organization... This week the company was accused of an editorial bias against conservative news organizations... much of its news gathering is determined by machines... But the company relies on a small editorial team to det…

the distance between strategy and execution is unfathomably wide for most businesses and executives... Strategy people too often have ideas that aren’t rooted in the reality of the operations. And operations people too often aren’t invested in executing the plans that the strategy people craft for them.... saying a specific individual is responsi…

Why not take some inspiration from the best headlines of the best headline writers? The blueprints exist to get your tweets, emails, updates, and articles clicked.

People don’t just consume news today. They participate in it... an opportunity for news publishers strained by shrinking resources and growing competition: Now more than ever, journalists can engage their audiences as contributors, advisors, advocates, collaborators and partners. This study describes in detail how newsrooms and independent journal…

In response to The Power of Writing About the Things You Read, by Srinivas Rao: "Fortunately, there are loads of digital equivalents to dog-earing pages and underlining passages for when you’re reading on a PC or phone. My favourite tools and processess: ..."

journalists can engage their audiences as contributors, advisors, advocates, collaborators and partners. This study describes in detail how newsrooms and independent journalists can grow their readership, boost their relevance and find new sources of revenue by listening to and learning from their audiences.... This is about how journalists can ge…

by using social media curation, news organisations can remove the need for readers to look elsewhere, by automatically pulling in relevant social content from around the internet onto their websites... produce a quick breaking-news social stream related to a subject, or social content specifically focused to highlight the ideas and arguments withi…

Technology is superior when humanity is woven into its DNA. I’m newly fond of saying, “Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?” Jelly sprung from the question, “What would search look like if it were created today?” We knew mobility and good old, human experience would be defining factors.... Enter your quest…

Charities have such a huge range of positive stories to tell and practical solutions to offer on so many of the big issues we face today, but too often they’re taking place under the radar.Constructive Voices will link up journalists and charities and equip both to approach news in a more constructive way, directing journalists to charities which …

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

content ... will continue to become the commodity... simply too much of it... the effort it takes to make sure that content will travel far and wide makes for considerable effort. Many will do this well but more will fail... If brands cannot create culture from scratch—they can co-create it with the right partners ... to do this at scale, they mu…

redefine the opinion poll, comments sections, and metrics around social conversations, all at once... the site presents various issues across the categories of culture, politics, entertainment, and sports that have been generating online debate and offers visitors two opposing hashtags to vote for on the site or share on Twitter for a 48-hour peri…

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

Any strategy that doesn't take the ability to execute is a lousy strategy to begin with. Strategy is not a game of chess, but depends on operational capacity... simply tacking on publishing functions to their existing operations without implementing any new processes or practices ... is a grave mistake.... The ongoing conversation with the audie…

After two years work analyzing more than 400,000 stories, the American Press Institute is beginning to find general patterns in what works to attract and hold the attention of digital readers... stories longer than 1,200 words, got 23 percent more engagement, 45 percent more social referrals and 11 percent more pageviews... photos (or audio or vid…

An introduction to the Content Strategy Glossary project, collaborative challenges, and a case example using one term that touches everybody in User Experience.

BART started talking back. The tweets weren't bland or automatically generated. They were super real, and sometimes super dark... a tactical move to both acknowledge the deplorable state of San Francisco's underfunded subway system and prove to residents that their government was aware of the issue and doing everything in its power to fix it.... T…

EurActiv.com is opening one of its media innovations to other media interested in increasing competitiveness through translated syndication. (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 with Mathew…

Comments on our own content create real community and offer vital feedback to content creators and consumers both. And thus, we should fight for them to be better. Comments are not just a nice-to-have but a core part of a media site’s mission... Lots of broken comment systems are designed for a platonic ideal of how people ought to behave.... Can …

Civil Comments, a commenting platform ... aims to produce respectful dialogue in comment sections through a system that crowdsources comment moderation... Commenters are shown two random comments from elsewhere on the site, and must rate the comments’ quality and civility and determine whether they include harassment, abuse, or personal attacks. T…

As our online behavior becomes more complex, I’ve found the term “online community” to be an inadequate and limiting way to describe the pockets of activity that I was seeing. I started playing around with different frameworks ... decided to concentrate on the two elements that were consistently the most useful: Engagement Length and Intimacy Leve…

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.