Overview: Communications Tactics

Looking forward to geeking out: Info architecture: Guessing some serious cardsorting went into this off the cuff remark: "the new FiveThirtyEight will provide coverage of five major subjects: politics, economics, sports, science, and lifestyle. By design, almost any topic in the news can potentially fit into one or more of these categories. " A…

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

There’s nothing more devastating than a rigorous debunk sprinkled liberally with acid. A model to keep in mind whenever setting the record straight: be entertaining.

"Placing quantity above quality, asking for non-nitpicky editing, and seeking an entrée into a journalist's 'Rolodex'—these are a few of our least-favorite things." God, a pastiche of this for EU comms is almost inevitable...

"As we enter a new year we have crowdsourced a checklist of 10 vital skills for journalists to produce digital content in the most effective ways ... We hope that the mix of skills, techniques and qualities listed below would help journalists to stay ahead of the game in terms of digital innovation, be able to harness the latest tools and techniq…

Not their star reporters. Not their politics coverage. An intern. Who never considered journalism as a career. But knew data visualisation. "On December 21 the quiz was posted and by the end of the year had become the site’s most popular piece of content for 2013." - Behind the dialect map interactive: How an intern created The New York Times’ m…

"I still catch myself thinking I know better than the wealth of data at my fingertips. That’s not to say your intuition and savvy as a marketer aren’t valuable. You need both. ... take a holistic look back at what worked well, what didn’t, and what you can double down on in the year to come." - Year End Analysis: How to Plan Your Content Based o…

"whole new publishing and technology system ... continually iterate on the site and take advantage of new technology trends ... instead of seeing major redesigns in the future, users will see more incremental changes" Key question: are the native ads clearly ads? - New York Times redesign points to future of online publishing - Jan. 8, 2014

Great advice for web data analysis everywhere: "We don’t live in a perfect world. Vague requests are going to get floated. ... that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognize and strive to minimize how often that happens. Here’s how: - Condition yourself to go to full alert whenever the word “interesting” is used ... - probe for clarification as much …

Great longread. Some excerpts: 1) It's a serious problem: "these online offenses are enough to make a woman want to click away from Twitter, shut her laptop, and power down her phone. Sometimes, we do withdraw: Pew found that from 2000 to 2005, the percentage of Internet users who participate in online chats and discussion groups dropped from 28…

“Comments from readers are probably one of the thorniest problems for online publishers of all kinds… and the methods for dealing with them are all over the map... We spoke to online editors and community managers at 104 news organisations from 63 countries across the globe, plus a selection of experts from the corporate and academic worlds to id…

Interesting survey of HuffPo, Techcrunch & other experiences with changing commenting systems and policies. - HuffPost policy banishes trolls — and drives away some frequent commenters | Poynter.

An alternative to Popular Science's approach: "Climate change articles trigger some of the most heated discussions on Ars Technica... a scientific matter with political ramifications, it's also the focus of astroturfers (fake grassroots movements), trolls, and the willfully scientifically illiterate. At Ars, we take trolling very seriously... we…

"ScribbleLive is an important tool for covering events and breaking news as well as for live chats. Journalists should get adept at using Scribble (or other liveblogging tools such as CoverItLive, Liveblogpro or Superdesk). But be sure to use it in tandem with Twitter. You don’t have to choose between them." - Using ScribbleLive, you can livetwee…

"we essentially write new content that we then throw away at the end of the day. Content shouldn’t die by design... topical contexualization... means guiding readers through large, convoluted news topics. ProPublica’s topic pages get us closer to contextualizing huge topics. For every major series that they cover over time, there’s a landing page…

Terrific article: "people are more likely to be moved by information that challenges their prejudices if they’re prevented from responding to it straightaway and it has time to sink in, to steep... On social media... the person you disagree with isn’t just misinformed but moronic, corrupt, evil. Complaints become rants. Rants become diatribes... …

"The process is called "seeding." While an old-hat to online advertising pros, it may come as something of a revelation to the rest of us who often wonder just how some YouTube videos blow up with tens of millions of views, while others languish in the humble thousands. "Every viral video that is very successful like this needs to have a good see…

Remind me to buy this guy's books: "There is no way by which events can be directly recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, different in every individual, differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each…

Starting to see the point of 1secondeveryday.com

The focus here is on business, but why not government? "By using communities, businesses can look beyond their four walls to access a global talent pool ... Communities allow businesses to accelerate and scale innovation by widening the funnel of what they can evaluate, by filling in missing skills and talent, and flattening the distance between …

"She was presenting on Blogger Relations – Why and How to Get Started. A perfect topic for her since she knows the issue from both sides. I asked her what was an important takeaway from her talk. Here is what she shared." - from the @Steveology blog

"At Menlo Innovations, structure and multiple keyboards allows you to split the difference between chaos and bureaucracy". - How One Company Replaced Meetings and Bureaucracy With Pairs, Ceremonies, and Storytelling, from Fast Company

NYTimes' collection: "the common thread is the form of storytelling — an integration of text, video, photography and graphics ... From a ship in the South China Sea to the cost of health care..."

Some key points from "The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement ... to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms: - Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them.... - Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, re…

Maybe EU hoax stories can be useful ... An interesting take from Nieman Journalism Lab on the value viral hoax stories can bring to conversations on complex topics. The point being that the hoax would not have gone viral in the first place if it did not touch upon a complex, important topic in some way: "Yet at the same time, these strings of …

"For those of you not familiar with native advertising, it refers to a publication serving up paid stories and editorial content the same way. You’ll hear this technique also referred to as sponsored content and branded journalism. With no one clicking on banner ads, publications hope to find economic salvation in native advertising. But here’s …

The rapid evolution in newsmedia provides a lot of ideas for better content strategies in a less organisational, more networked society. One such concept is ideas-based, or fluid, beats for journalism: "... a way for reporters to be human-centric rather than newsroom- or bureaucracy-centric", according to the latest piece in Niemanlab's Journalis…

#Context emerging as 2014 theme: "...newsrooms are going to reframe our understanding of “responsive design.” We’re going to see content move beyond simply responding to screen size and instead respond to reader context, adapting to behavior." - Nieman Journalism Lab

Neat use of Twitter and Storify storytelling, used by 2 different people to tell the same underlying (and inspiring) story in different ways.

"Flow provides a powerful and flexible technology that addresses a range of real-time information challenges"