Overview: Communications Tactics

Email, for all the claims of it being dead, is critical for many publishers as a distribution (and marketing) channel they continue to control... Email newsletters have become an important part of publishers’ audience development strategies as a way to deepen their relationship with readers by providing an antidote to the endless stream of news in…

The main Topics this time are language technology, mobile innovation and EU communications, with a few extras to catch-up since the last edition.

The New York Times smartphone products now have redefined Page One for the digital era. Finally, we have a model. Mobile can be harnessed to share the day’s news, and works far better to keep us informed than newsprint ever could....engagement — more minutes, now especially in mobile — drives subscription sales, retention, and the ability to incre…

sometimes people post disagreeable or disturbing content that does not violate Facebook's policies. This paper explores the potential of community-driven counter-speech to play a critical role in challenging and diminishing these type of posts on social media. Counter-speech is a common, crowd-sourced response to extremism or hateful content... F…

Berners-Lee suggested a simple rethink in how social networks and human nature work together could help curtail negative behaviour... "we have responsibility to think how to build systems that tend to produce constructive criticism and harmony as opposed to negativity and bullying."

everything one needs to know about ... the Google Analytics add-on for Google Sheets.... value-add to a reporting workflow is that it’s extremely flexible, reliable, and a real time-saver... allows you to: Pull any data that you’d be able to access in the Analytics API (i.e analytics.google.com) directly into a spreadsheet...

the press help shed sunlight on the inner workings of government, expose flaws and problems in our system, and inform the citizenry, making journalism a cornerstone of a healthy democracy... explanatory journalism... is particularly worthy of attention for its role in improving public knowledge and contributing to a more informed populace.The vide…

Democrats and Republicans sometimes seem to be living in two different Americas. We analyzed the past seven debates on each side to show which topics are most discussed within each party (nice, simple data visualisation here)

What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes a lot of sense. What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization.... All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time... Frazzled, exhausted, and …

if he tried to make ads that were beautiful and perfect, it wouldn’t work and his fans would know... his work routinely pulls in millions of views because he’s transparent with his audience... mostly teenage boys know when they’re being peddled a product.

Newswhip data suggests that Facebook’s live videos, which by their very nature are longer and encourage users to comment, drive higher engagement than traditional short Facebook videos. Facebook even recommends that live streams go for at least 5 minutes, if not longer. Both Fusion and Vox.com are aiming to do future live streams in the 20-minute …

Great explainer video - accompanying article here.

We still write stories for the web as if they were fixed and transitory, but they’re not... people have expected that something like 70 per cent of traffic would be to “new” content, and the rest to the “archive”. The reality usually proves to be exactly the other way around... we’re over-weight in publishing “news” and significantly under-weight …

Why are explainers suddenly so popular?... Explainers should create “a scaffold of understanding that future reports can attach to”... a counterpart to the endless streams of headlines, posts and tweets that are how most digital natives find their news today.

if news content focuses on the ‘Who, What, When, and Where,’ explainer journalism looks to inform the reader of the ‘How and Why’... give the reader background information about a story to ensure that they are able to properly understand events as they unfold... Explainer journalism enables the media provider to at least show some intelligence an…

building community means intentionally creating a culture, every step of the way... It’s hard to overstate the importance of community guidelines... members ... didn’t want to be a part of a community where people were fighting all the time, but had been afraid to speak up in the discussion, lest they get dragged into the fray. with every post, e…

Enter the new editors of the Internet: giant, centralized tech companies that have created platforms... notably Facebook and Apple — want to be the newsstands of tomorrow: the place we go, inside their own ecosystems, to get our news and information... journalism organizations feel they have no alternative but to be part of those ecosystems. This …

It’s tempting to merely argue that the recent crop of newsletters are what came to replace the independent blogosphere of the mid-aughts.... take a look at the subject lines for several of the newsletters ... Any web editor who plugged these as headlines into a CMS would be summarily fired... why are readers responding so well when they fly in th…

"AMP is not just about news and not just about articles" ... going forward, the focus will be on new creative ad experiences... highly compelling interactive experiences within the format ... this needs to be easy to implement ... seen a lot of organizations with small engineering teams implement this into their homegrown CMSes within a few days…

seen as its answer to the walled garden of Facebook’s Instant Articles... in tests, AMP pages loaded 85 percent faster than regular Web pages... We know faster pages are going to do better in mobile search; why would we not do everything we can do make it faster?”

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.

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…

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…

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…

"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…