Overview: Communications Tactics

“Go in and add some information, thank them for finding mistakes, thank them for adding information on their own ... You want to have a dialogue with them.” Well, duh. - Eight best practices for journalists who reply to online comments | Current.org

Th@e new Guardian Visuals team will bring together ... the graphics desk, picture desk, interactive team and parts of the digital design and multimedia teams... it's hard to assemble teams that are cross-disciplinary ... and have the right combination of designers, developers, graphic artists, photographers." - Guardian forms new editorial teams…

"A newsroom typically contains reporters, editors, data journalists, developers, designers … But traditionally they work in separate departments, unable to seamlessly collaborate together. That’s why silos don’t work. Instead, there should be a horizontal of these newsroom archetypes to truly integrate the journalism with the tech." - J-teams, le…

"Collaboration on the web has always been a challenge. Beyond the typically one-dimensional CMS, other familiar tools such as Google Docs and Dropbox also fall short because they either lack multimedia support (Docs) or don’t offer a true version control system (Dropbox). Over the past year-and-a-half, however, a host of potential collaboration s…

"journalists should see Vine as a resource for more social storytelling,... A key step for producing a good Vine is to think "video first", and build the story around the element that you want to visualise... "A good Vine is one that you want to keep watching ... It's not a story, it's not a tweet, it's a little tiny loop that should look good." …

"So if you too are just starting out with scraping, here are five of the most useful tools I’ve encountered while learning and working on my project." - Five data scraping tools for would-be data journalists | Knight Lab | Northwestern University

"L'explosion du numérique et du transmédia a permis aux créateurs de développer leur univers et leur storytelling sur un grand nombre de supports. " - Comprendre le transmédia en 5 points | InaGlobal

"... a new way of measuring the actual attention of readers, as part of a move to get publishers and advertisers to stop focusing only on clicks and pageviews... Unlike pageviews, which simply measure whether a page has loaded, or even unique visitors ... metrics like “active exposure time,” ... can determine how much time a reader spent with a s…

""How to stop trolling online?” is the question of the moment. From [Quora's] inception, its efforts have been geared towards “making quality scale,” ... also meant keep making the application a safe place for users to write... It has introduced a new anti-harassment feature, where users are prompted to flag any comment or post ... Quora moderat…

The last is the best: "14... One sure way to trigger writer's block when blogging is to think, "I have to capture all my thoughts on this idea and write it about it definitively once and for all."" I definitely fell into that trap, and also definitely found that I could: "... work around the edges of an idea over days and weeks and months and re…

Just substitute 'governments' for 'businesses' and 'brands', 'citizens' for 'customers', and 'policy' for 'product' in this excellent HBR post: "Businesses need to take Ello and its manifesto as a wake-up call to rethink the way they use social networks to reach customers... That means stepping back from the relentless quest for followers, click…

The seminal launch 538 launch post: "... while the first two steps of the process (collecting and organizing information in the form of news stories) are thought to fall within the province of “objective” journalism, explanatory journalism is sometimes placed in the category of “opinion journalism.” ... [which] doesn’t seem to abide by the standa…

A useful look at how user-centricity has leapt out of the web department and into the business strategy: "... Quartz ... Gawker, BuzzFeed and Tumblr... are increasingly thinking about what they do as providing a service, not just as a business that generates content and then delivers it to people.... you have to experiment, and iterate rapidly, …

"This is a Big Deal for a lot of people right now, because the software companies that support our social lives have become so evil and pervasive and controlling in recent years." - What Does Ethical Social Networking Software Look Like? — The Message — Medium

"What's fascinating about Longform isn't its success... but how it went from a fairly simple website to an ambitious world-changing platform by nothing more than user feedback. No abstract theories... Just the simple power of going iteratively from MVP to a product people want... the new Longform app allows you to follow individual writers' wor…

"The New York Times today introduced “Watching,” a major new feature on the NYTimes.com homepage on desktop and on the mobile website. Watching is a stream of developing and noteworthy news designed to amplify the scope and urgency of The Times’s digital report. Watching offers a tailored feed of the news of the moment, such as early outlines of …

"The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us... it turns out to be boring.... if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning... Information is ... an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense ... the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchem…

As commented on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/New-Narrative-Europe-closing-event-4203563.S.5916497700450234368), a poll with an interesting set of options to choose from: "Do you: a) Love Europe as a state of mind? b) Love Europe as a solution to the challenges we face together? c) Love Europe for its victory over the barriers which o…

Great piece on corporate journalism from the FT. "The Richmond Standard is one of the more polished sites to emerge in the age of hyper-local digital news brands such as Patch and DNAinfo.com... it is run and funded by Chevron, the $240bn oil group which owns the Richmond refinery that in August 2012 caught fire... sending more than 15,000 reside…

"think-tanks, the semi-academic institutions that come up with ideas for politicians [are] increasingly doing journalism—not just blogging and tweeting but foreign reporting, too. Deskbound journalists, meanwhile, are embracing data and spreadsheets." Really? Think tanks are basically glorified PR firms for political movements/parties, so this mo…

"Corporations are tempted to take over journalism with increasingly better contents. ... dangers and hopes for new revenue streams." Interesting figures on the decline in journalists and the rise of PR specialists, cause by 2 trends: "while the journalistic staffing is shrinking dramatically ... the public relation crowd is rising in a spectacul…

"...another link in a chain of legal rulings that help establish the idea that bloggers - and other members of ... "the networked fourth estate," ... can be seen as performing acts of journalism... we need to protect acts of journalism, not just specific actors who engage in them. the First Amendment protects acts of journalism or publishing — …

Others have written on the return of the enewsletter, but I don't think anyone saw it as the home page: "Yes, the homepage is still dead, which is why our new front door is quite different from most. ... we are offering an efficient briefing on global business news, ... intended to be read straight through, like a well written memo from a trusted…

"more publishers are trying to opt out of the pageview rat race.... The Financial Times will next month begin selling time by the hour for any ad ... The Economist Group is rolling out a new set of “dynamic attention metrics” to help advertisers buy time rather than impressions for their ads."... The rise of clickbait ... can be tracked back to …

"when an email newsletter, which looks look superb on desktop, fails to render properly on a mobile device, respondents either hit delete or unsubscribe." - Responsive Email Design: Benefits, How-To, Examples + More | JUST™ Creative

As I mentioned in my previous post, the past couple of years have seen a lot of innovation in online content strategy, coupled with growing disenchantment with "Big Internet".

On #icebucketchallenge, obviously. - I Scream, You Scream, We all Scream ‘Look at Me’ | LinkedIn

"As #ISISMediaBlackout gathered pace it became one of the world's first anti-viral virals. Tweeted around 20,000 times, it managed to eclipse the content itself. #ISISMediaBlackout might be a sign that social media is taking the step forwards that it most badly needs.... It needs digital citizenship, the realisation that our behaviour online a…

"The process of placing an ad on News Feed is a complicated dance. Facebook has to decide not only which ad to show to its users, but when to show it to them... any given user has around 1,500 stories they could see each day. ... a rather complex algorithm that weights how engaging each post is ... and a wide range of other signals ... For examp…

"Brands that try to get in on the social conversation around 9/11 can come off as crass and opportunistic. " "can" come off as crass?? Really? This is the crassest thing I can imagine. - This Guy's Replies to 9/11 Brand Tweets Sum Up Everything That's Wrong With 9/11 Brand Tweets | Adweek