Overview: Communications Tactics

Even for brands associated with hard news…their top or second videos in terms of Facebook engagement numbers turned out to be animal videos... interest in video news does increase significantly when there is a big breaking news story. But the rest of the time? Online video news is less of a force than publishers might hope... 97.5 percent of time…

Slack, already an indispensable tool within newsrooms, is becoming a surprisingly effective community tool for publishers as well... quickly become a source of stories, with members providing inspiration or even direct contributions.

Read the same documents our reporters gathered. Watch the video out-takes of an interview, or take a 360-degree virtual reality adventure. Test your knowledge about complex issues with a quiz. Sound off about issues, interacting through polls and emoticons or by leaving a comment. We’ll give you the tools and access to become involved, either in d…

Post’s website and mobile apps are a pleasure to use; the apps have been designed to serve different audiences depending on whether they are traditional Post readers or are instead interested in a more viral product offered at a lower price and that omits local news.... Bandito allows editors to publish articles with up to five different headlines…

includes translating political explainers as "part of our attempt to reach new readers who are interested in American politics — but perhaps don't speak English... "We were convinced that there is a need for translated articles, but we hadn't hit on the right formulation in terms of how to get a professionalized translation that's turned around qu…

websites that support Chrome push notifications can send out updates that look and feel like regular app updates even if the Chrome browser isn't currently active on an Android device.. it requires an HTML5 feature called a Service Worker ... notifications will work on desktop and on Android, but not on iOS.... it will be up to web developers to …

media companies, from the Telegraph to Bloomberg, have spent serious money pushing their video products... the path to monetisation is still not clear: the cost of creating content is high, and business models involving adverts are being affected by adblocking and falling rates (cpm's)... if you are going to attempt to make money from video, succ…

“In five years time, I want News U.K. — The Sun and The Times — to be as well known for its video content as for its newspapers” ... 70 percent of The Sun’s articles have some video component... a main driver for the video verticals is to appeal to advertisers and brands who want to sponsor videos... It will continue posting several Live videos a…

Search engines, social media and news aggregators are great at surfacing information close to our interests, but they are limited by the set of topics and people we choose to follow. Even if we read multiple news sources every day, what we discover is defined by the languages we are able to read, and the topics that our sources decide to cover. Ul…

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…

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 …

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…

... 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…

Over the last six months we’ve been collaborating with The Atlantic to bring three interactive articles to life... We set out to create an immersive, yet thoughtful reading experience and I’d like to share some of our insights that helped get us there... live site here: http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/athenahealth/.. we decided to build an …

As a reporte... there may be a simple solution to the bad commenter problem: You. When reporters get involved, it results in fewer uncivil comments, according to research... “it’s like a teacher walks into a classroom and suddenly all the kids are quiet and fold their hands at their desks.” Here are a few tips and best practices for reporters in …

uncivil comments dropped by 15 percent when reporters were participating in the conversation

a closer look at what types of comment sections news organizations ... value they are adding to news organizations’ overarching strategies...a list of questions to ask and best practices for news organizations seeking return on investment...key questions, considerations and links to further reading for evaluating what commenting strategy works bes…

bringing new technology into the newsroom to change how the outlet commissions and publishes opinion pieces ... expand the coverage beyond just text, into visual story formats that can be accessed and shared across different platforms.... the FT's comment section is a "huge source of strength and a very valuable asset".... a new Facebook commu…

we want to create use cases for people with limited time available to explore news stories on the mobile ... challenge is to provide the news in a quick, snappy format while also providing the opportunity to deepen their understanding when needed. As well as providing summaries and deeper information we feel this approach could lead to news bec…

full rollout in those markets, and elsewhere in Europe, is slated for “early 2016”.) Upday sounds as if it will be aggregating a variety of editorial content based on contextual signals available via mobile — such as user location and interests. UPDAY will offer Samsung customers access to a range of news content that combines ‘Need to Know’ in…

By 2016, most content will be consumed ... on other people’s platforms... Snapchat Discover, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News... Google AMP is coming soon, and it will provide an Instant-like experience for not only Google users but also those using Twitter, Pinterest, and other platforms

In this week’s edition, a months’ reading - some 30 posts - on social media, digital transformation, content/system design and EuroPCom2015. But first some news from me

Facebook and Apple... have chosen to focus on a future that takes the shape of an article... largely developed in response to the constraints of print ... a great opportunity for news organizations themselves to rethink those assumptions... considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate …

"Accelerated Mobile Pages speed up mobile page load times through a new open framework called AMP HTML, which Google says "allows websites to build light-weight web pages." Google says it has nearly 30 publishers signed on to participate in the project, including The New York Times, Vox and Gannett." (What was the point posting each of the 6 ar…

the Google standard gives publishers a streamlined page-loading script they can use that takes advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make the various elements load faster...an order of magnitude faster than the typical mobile page... a completely open standard that any publisher can implemen…

Media Cloud... is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media... by collecting and analyzing the news stream of tens of thousands of online sources.... academic researchers, journalism critics, policy advocates, media scholars, and others c…

... it’s fantastic... there is a lot to nitpick, but it is fantastic from a strategic perspective.... Twitter just reinvented the newspaper. It’s not just any newspaper though — it has the potential to be the best newspaper in the world... imagine a tweet-based newspaper drawn not only from the best sources in a mobile-friendly format, but one …

“moments” are mini news digests of tweets across a range of topics... with splashy full-screen photos and videos. Each individual moment is made up of about 10 tweets... allows users to follow stories they’re interested in for a limited period of time... clearly targeted at curious or casual users... a “catch-me-up” type of news digest, using t…

Google and Twitter to help publishers show “instant articles” to people who use their services on mobile phones... Twitter users or Google search users who click on a link while using their phones will see full articles pop up on their screens almost immediately... an open source project, and hope to convince multiple tech companies to adopt it…

Here’s how BuzzFeed, The Economist, The New York Times, Quartz, Vox, and Yahoo News slim down a day’s worth of news into manageable forms. Every day, readers are faced with a firehose of news online. News organizations realize this, and they’re trying a bunch of different ways to make the news more manageable — creating chatty summaries of thei…