Overview: Media

I’ve read dozens of journalism postmortems and tweets lamenting how and why journalists got it wrong last week. Here’s a short, probably-not-comprehensive summary:... Among the 30 survey questions sent to journalists: What's your biggest blind spot? The first answer was: “Groupthink. We draw from a limited pool of people who generally have a simi…

information bubbles didn’t burst on 8 November, but ... mainstream media and polling systems underestimated the power of alt-right news sources and smaller conservative sites that largely rely on Facebook to reach an audience... fake news is not a uniquely Republican problem... What is ... is the validation given to fake news by the now president-…

Breitbart News Network is expanding its U.S. operations and launching sites in Germany and France... as it seeks to monetize the anger and anti-immigrant sentiment unleashed by Donald Trump’... Milo Yiannopoulos is ... explore launching a new television show... an opening to tap ... a wave of American populism similar to forces driving Britain …

How to make sense of Donald Trump’s election? Here are some articles which helped me. Maybe they’ll help you.

many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”... if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth... when confron…

Two convergent trends are making populism a potent negative force. First, democracies have morphed into unrepresentative plutocracies that lead growing numbers of people to feel shut out and voiceless... Media ... business model is now based on social media and clicks, not facts. Clicks depend on theatrical performance, stunts, celebrity, ent…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…

Their job is to navigate the world of information, help scholars and students get what they need, and distinguish good information from bad. They’ve faced their own technological disruptions, and have responded by developing a set of principles to help their public assess the credibility of information and use it ethically. They call this framewor…

42% use editorial teams for native advertising... Yet 38% say the lack of separation of the editorial and commercial sides of the business is a threat

Facebook seems incapable of rooting out hoaxes even after acknowledging they are clearly fake news... at least five different pages shared a story after Facebook acknowledged it was fake and were still able to reach tens of thousands of people through the social network. None of the posts carry any warning that the content is fake... BuzzFeed anal…

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

The debate on whether Facebook is a media company or not is not new... My take: it matters how users perceive Facebook, not how others — Facebook insiders or not — define it.

hierarchy of good writing, particularly of good science writing... Explainers make information clear and comprehensible... Elucidators go beyond explanation and into illumination — they transmute information into understanding by ... integrating various bits of knowledge into a larger framework of comprehension... Enchanters do all of the above, b…

Spectrm is one of the first ventures that allows publishers to create and manage so-called chatbots for delivering content to audiences over messaging platforms including Facebook Messenger, Slack and Telegram... niche articles, only available on certain publications, seem to be more popular than general news that’s widely available elsewhere... …

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…

voters feel let down by the BBC’s coverage being hampered by impartiality rules... we are entering, as the Americans seem to have entered, an era of identity politics where the politicians, the campaigners, are seeking by a process of nods and winks to let you know: ‘Hey, this is where you belong. Your people are here.’”

Decline of text in favour of videos means more Trumps and Berlusconis around the world... the internet which was the last word-centred public space after the decline of print journalism, is capitulating to the television format... public opinion in the age of television is more a set of “emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the …

where curated broadcast channels shine and it’s easier than ever to search for live videos

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,”

using Facebook to repackage some of its magazine stories into video form... takes advantage of a Facebook tool that lets publishers merge a series of photos into videos... kept things simple... roughly 30 seconds and rarely going beyond a few words, a chart, or a photo in each individual slide... take as little as two minutes

isn’t squeamish about mixing marketing and editorial.... For instance, a commercial journalist sits within the editorial team and creates content for the ESI Media brands across a vertical like TV and entertainment, will help pitch ideas for a relevant TV client

Referral traffic to publishers from LinkedIn ... has been on a steady uptick... In January, publishers saw traffic to their sites from LinkedIn explode, in some cases tripling...puts LinkedIn into the top-10 referrers of the web... Publishers are now in a better position to make decisions on LinkedIn editorial strategy... a very particular traffi…

Pay models are gaining some traction... increased focus on appealing to smaller, but more dedicated, audiences ... 10 to 20 percent of revenues from digital...monetizing mobile of course remains an open question... “Honestly, now, I think there is no business model.” Here are a few interesting case studies

Circa 360, will produce two weekly ad-supported VR pieces... brands can run VR-shot pre-roll ads... take our consumers to places that journalists get to go but the public very seldom gets to ... immersive advertising ... augmented reality ad spots... short videos that hand off to each other—they have a purpose or a pathway to see other stuff b…

two products, Springboard and Time Inc. Connect to help editors source content from contributors, some for traditional editorial content and some for native or branded content... a way for editors to create more content around specific topics or events rather than just getting content on the cheap... gathering ... people with some degree of social…

NBC News has found that people are willing to click through to its site when there’s breaking news, so it’s posting less of those articles on Instant Articles while posting more feature-type content... The New York Times ... tended to be long-form think pieces or analysis, not breaking news

Far from disappearing, human curation and sensibilities have a new value in the age of algorithms... Facebook is mired in a series of controversies about the curation of its news feed... recently tried to smooth the process out by firing its human editors … only to find the news feed degenerated into a mass of fake and controversial news stories.…

To try and focus on all our energy to bring new readers to site as opposed to serving loyal readers began to feel like the wrong way to look at it… identified a set of metrics that stand for loyalty ... created content people wanted to come back for on the regular. So far, it’s delivering: site traffic is up 31 percent... People who come 25 times…