Overview: Communications Tactics

why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews... Wikipedia’s formulaic style and continuous format are more conducive to collaborative writing projects ... writing a news story with a lead, a coherent narrative, and a deadline is very different than writing an encyclopedia article...tension between the Wikipedia community... …

people with low levels of formal education are much less likely to ... rely on news organisations ... more likely to rely on social media and messaging ... Argentina, South Korea, Spain, and the US, young people are much more likely to rely on social media... Germany, the UK, and the US, to rely on messaging applications groups...very high numbers…

we need to lock on our analytics to the people who willfully return to our work... There’s no one single metric that tells you how loyal... your audience is.... The Center for Cooperative Media ... audience explorer dashboard... plugs into Google Analytics... splits audiences into “Brand Lovers,” “Prospective Loyalists” and “Casual,”... free and e…

News... is a standardized nonfiction literary form and only one of the many kinds of a journalistic output.... if the context of what we called “news” for nearly two centuries has radically altered, is news still functioning as it should?... The invention of the electric telegraph in the 1830s allowed ... bursts of information in ... messages, wh…

What if “persuadability” isn’t the right metric to look at? ... Information warfare expert Molly McKew, who specializes in U.S.–Russia relations... "There aren’t good tools to evaluate the impact of shadow campaigns... Information and psychological operations ... are not just about information, but about changing behavior... of more than 36,000 …

aimed to find new ways to help verified facts reach the widest possible audience. The competition sought creative solutions that newsrooms can adopt to take fact-checking beyond long-form explanations and bullet points.... selected teams from Argentina, Italy, Georgia and Mexico as the winners. ·

How do we convert users playing the game into users who would complete the survey?... take our readers on a visual journey around the world so they could explore where a news story happened. As a payoff, for every correct answer, the user would collect a stamp in their virtual passport... opted to follow an interesting take on the minimal viable p…

with a group, I as a community editor will have much more control and freedom over managing the discussion.... Here are some of the more interesting ways that publishers are using this feature:

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…

Brilliant piece of data journalism

Bot Studio... will focus on two main areas: How bots and artificial intelligence can help journalists do their jobs better and how news consumers can use them to access news and information... conference bot, a Twitter bot — @newsnerdbot. We scraped the conference website ... fed that into a database, and then wired that up to a natural-language …

Publishers are using Facebook’s latest Instant Articles update, which lets publishers post multiple articles within one post, to publish regular editions of must-read content straight to the platform.... akin to receiving a daily email with the day’s top stories, but readers won’t have to leave Facebook to get it... option to subscribe to get aler…

what more than 12,000 people[i] told us about comment sections on 20 different news sites.... 81% ... would like it if journalists clarified factual questions in the comment section... 73% ... would like it if experts on the topic of the article responded... 58%, would like it if journalists actively contributed to comment sections...

BBC’s Reality Check team will focus on content that is clearly fabricated and attempting to mislead the public into thinking it has been produced by a reputable news organisation... part of the BBC’s attempt to do more “slow news”, using in-depth analysis and expertise in a bid to help the public understand an especially tumultuous period in the …

thousands of activists have started to push companies to take a stand on ... “hate news” ... Sleeping Giants ... and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys... In the old normal,…

thoughtfully designed user interfaces can make us a freer, more humane, and more just society, just as poorly designed ones seem to have made many of us less compassionate, less informed, and more antagonistic... for a case study, we only need to look ... online forum Nextdoor.com originally ... a way of fostering community through neighborhood-s…

Major enterprise stories — stories that take deep dives and attempt to inform readers in substantive ways or to elicit impact... require considerable resources... the potential audience is limited... how can journalists get readers to complete these long pieces?use multiple elements and platforms to tell the story... the parts that pull your reade…

my research team’s analysis of data from Columbia University’s Emergent rumor tracker suggests that this misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information... limiting news fakers’ ability to sell ads... a step in the right direction. But it will not curb abuses driven by political motives... Using BotOrNot, our colleagues found…

Raising Barriers... took readers to eight countries across three continents and examined the divisions between countries and peoples through interwoven words, video and sound... we used every multimedia tool in our arsenal. Here’s what we learned from the experience

we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of journalists experimenting with immersive storytelling to tell important stories in new ways... Journalism 360, an initiative to build a network of journalists willing to tackle those challenges and share what they’re learning. With this effort, we’re looking to support experiments, provide training wor…

people comment 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos... we wanted to highlight some of the recent trends and themes we’ve seen emerge... Local reporters often have devoted fans who are interested in viewing their authentic Facebook Live content. Certain news content resonates...

With its reliance on polling data over source cultivation and number crunching over narrative, FiveThirtyEight... is at the forefront of a shift in the way political journalism is practiced.... being an outsider, maybe you’re able to call B.S. a little easier. That’s a helpful role to have.... the site attracted nearly 10 million unique visitors …

“So far, the growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand,”

I find value in reader comments that can’t be adequately reproduced elsewhere. The argument that the conversation has migrated to Facebook and Twitter is flawed. ... they are no substitute for having discussion take place where the story itself lives. ... News organizations should fix online comments rather than ditch them... the feedback is... f…

BBC Business Unit has been experimenting with 'news you can use', a concept which mimics tutorials and informational videos popular with YouTube viewers, in a bid to engage a wider audience on social media... Using just his mobile phone, Shaw is able to shoot videos quickly and easily, wherever he can grab the interviewees.

We’re serious journalists who understand audiences and analytics. But we see a plethora of story ideas — and people — in all of that data.

as news outlets tailor their content to addictive platforms to pump up traffic, the distinction between consuming journalism and being wedded to “emails, constant notifications, and social media” is increasingly meaningless... if we are what and how we read, then our thinking will mirror the scattered and shallow tendencies of Web browsing.... …

Deepstream makes it easy to remix one or more livestreams by adding context and background... by introducing a new role into the livestreaming ecosystem: the curator... easily embed live video into a player that includes context cards... set up with just a few clicks to feature news stories, polls, maps, tweets, free text and more to help you expl…

David and Petros were there to conduct the FT’s first experiment with livestreaming 360-degree video... we failed to produce a watchable live stream... we learnt eight specific lessons for next time:

The public is no longer uninformed. They are misinformed, and that requires an entirely different editorial focus ... just reporting the news doesn't actually solve the public's needs. Now your focus must be on explaining the news instead.... the newspaper is stuck in an existential crisis ... stop being a newspaper and start being something el…