Overview: Communications Strategy

my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.” Well, almost... The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem... A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me ... orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in …

the solution to both crises facing journalism may come from the same technological root: blockchain... An ecosystem of micropayments... as the holy grail for online journalism... Blockchain technology can create both chains of authenticity and a level of security... Sludge is one of the “first fleet” of around 20 newsrooms ... on a new blockchai…

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…

"the Internet has dismantled newspaper’s geographic monopoly & business model ... & also upended the core assumptions underlying the actual journalism ... BuzzFeed as an organization has been figuring out what works online for over eight years now, and while “The Dress” may have been unusual in its scale, its existence was no accident... BuzzFee…

Good overview of Circa's approach: "A new model for online journalism is emerging, focusing on the atomization of news stories into “bite-sized chunks” of information aimed at mobile audiences."

For those still confused: "Content marketing is not PR as such... But there is a basic realization that people are tired of ads and having promotional messages pushed on them. So called “branded journalism” is ... often compelling high-quality content that many newspaper editors would wish their journalists could produce.... brands seem sometimes …

"With the launch of new site after new site in 2014, it's been a fascinating time to watch digital media try to figure itself out. Amid the turmoil of disruption, buffeted by tech companies' control over information distribution, but aware of new fields of possibility, the past few years were filled with defending legacy brands. So this new round…

"We explain the European court of justice ruling saying that Google will have to delete some information from its index – and why it has divided opinion" Good example of explainer journalism, and of how answering the comments often looks like more work than writing the thing in the first place (if you don't believe me, scan the comments): - Expl…

Deadtree media to do more with legacy content than paper birdcages! The latest high-profile move into explanatory journalism is New York Times' The Upshot: "offer a combination of data journalism and explanatory reporting ... head-to-head with Ezra Klein’s Vox and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight ... a kind of internal aggregator and explainer for…

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

Excellent overview of a complex topic. Makes me think that a lot of EU communications could benefit hugely from reframing itself as "non-profit news", and considering these questions in depth. Alas, the only interesting debate in this field seems to be limited to the US. "The value of online and offline audience engagement is a question that bot…

Is data journalism just another opportunity to bamboozle an audience? Surely publishing the data in interrogable form would be the answer? "data give commentary a false sense of authority since data analysis is inherently prone to bias. The author’s priors, what he believes or wants to be true before looking at the data, often taint results that …

A pretty good idea of where news & journalism will be in 5 years, or deja vu all over again? "the organizations worth backing must be run by tech savvy, top-notch people focused on social distribution of stories that serve an existing but underserved niche audience. ... “They are all technology companies first ... understand how people utilize t…

"We don’t write articles. We tell stories and those stories persist over time... Each story is comprised of fragments ... stitched together to create a story. In many ways circa represents the next step in the atomization of news ... allows people to read stories and identify new developments faster ... and makes it possible to dig deeper by lin…

"“Fished out of the shadows, old news coverage in China’s media can provide clues to the family connections of government officials as reporters investigate their financial dealings.”"

Les Echos looks to be doing what I have long dreamed to do for the bloggingportal reboot - deploy semantic analysis to aid content discovery and to underpin a new wave of media and comment. But do we have to call it an 'aggrefilter'? "Les Echos launches its business news aggrefilter ... to gain critical working knowledge of the semantic web." …

Damn, some of these ideas I implemented 12 years ago for the EC's thematic architecture. Nice to see them in a different context: First, the problem with current news journalism: "The column inches devoted to the new are column inches not given to the important... this stress on novelty is a holdover from when the cost of making and moving paper …

Nice NYTimes tour of the current news startup wave: Key point: "quality, customized advertising on sites with good editorial content was actually a solid business with growing margins... Business Insider has had nine consecutive quarters where the revenue per page was rising.... “There are fundamental secular trends — ad growth, mobile growth, pa…

Interesting points emerging from the first two articles I’ve seen about Jason Calacanis’ his new venture, Inside.com.

Medium on how magazine editing is morphing as technology transforms online longform: "Online, each story is at best its own magazine, sent out to find its own temporary audience. One article may absorb people who subscribe, or would once have subscribed, to Foreign Affairs; another might absorb devotees of Wired or Men’s Health or Glamour. The au…

NYTimes.com on how legacy organisations failed to go digital, leaving field open to tech-first startups: "Vox is a digitally native business, a technology company that produces media, as opposed to a media company that uses technology. Everything at Vox, from the way it covers subjects, the journalists it hires and the content management systems …

“There is a huge audience of readers out there craving this kind of storytelling ... With phones and tablets, they now always have a reading device available on them to dig into something.”

A great article on preventing the data tail wagging the editorial dog. " It turns out that what loyal audiences care about is what good editorial teams care about too: great articles that capture time and attention."

"That's about 100,000 business opportunities we provide publishers every minute." - good article on how slow the newsindustry was. Interesting thoughts too on balancing algorithmic approach with human concerns. Google News at 10 - The Atlantic http://t.co/Fupf11B6

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