Overview: Communications Tactics

"the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers" with most of the top writers making "seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers".Talent making money direct from audience is not limited to journalists on substack: try "a…

The fact that this is actually necessary is saddening: "practical, nonpartisan, evidence-based recommendations to journalists covering the 2020 U.S. presidential election", including how to cover an election amid attempts to undermine it; what to do in the case of a contested result or Trump doesn't concede; and "what to do if …

when climate skeptics in government and media control the message and the channels, it becomes fact for people like councilor Allen that Australia’s fires... have “nothing” to do with climate change... Climate skepticism runs deep in Australia, origin of ... Murdoch’s media empire... long history of climate science denial and diversion... in the w…

The record is incorruptible... this sort of recordkeeping is valuable for journalism: it allows us to maintain archives that can’t be censored or altered after the fact... an ad-free publishing economy on Civil’s Ethereum-based platform... Popula is accountable to its readers alone, and is impervious to the interests and agendas of advertisers or…

combat fake news by combining professional journalism with volunteer fact checking... professional journalists will be paid to write “global news stories,” while volunteer contributors will “vet the facts, helps make sure the language is factual and neutral... transparent about the source of news, posting full transcripts, video, and audio of in…

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

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."

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, …

"...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 — …

"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 …

One for @richardmedic ... "Smydra ... he wants to find a way to allow the public to benefit from all the knowledge of future news events locked up inside newsrooms.... He'd love your thoughts" - Can you turn future news events into structured data? » Nieman Journalism Lab

New report ”examines the current state of data journalism... calling for more transparency on how data is collected and used in journalism, anticipating an explosion in news apps as a way of producing information, and ways newsrooms can address security around their data and reporting. " In particular, I love this: "...the advice that newsroom le…

"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…

"... technical weaknesses in the paper’s backend: The lack of an organized system of tags to organize stories’ metadata ..."

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…

"data-driven journalism doesn’t simply strive to contribute to public policy and culture debates, it aims to end them with a decisive answer. ... In Actually Journalism, news and opinion aren’t needed; to understand something, all the audience needs is this fact, this piece of data, this answer... [but] if Actually Journalism can’t find a way to e…

Surprise surprise... "Circa is developing two types of ads: magazine-style full-screen banners, like Flipboard, and sponsored posts... which look and feel like editorial, created by a separate staff.... One future revenue possibility would be licensing access to Circa's article data to other publishers," - News App Circa Looks to Na…

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 …

"“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.”"

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 …

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.

#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

Consider this your starting point to tap into Google’s suite of digital tools that can enhance newsgathering and exposure across television, radio, print and online. Whether it’s refining your advanced search capabilities, improving audience engagement through Google+, or learning how to visualize data using Google Maps, this website is intended …

“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.”