Overview: Media

Google formed its Digital News Initiative... €150-million innovation fund, though I see that more as a blackmail pot than as a strategic benefit to a struggling industry: bags of coins tossed to drowning journalists.

The permanent banning of uber-troll Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter was probably long overdue. It's time for non-trolls to stop complaining and start defending civility in our social spaces, or simply decamp to build better ones.

the first article in a series on “The Mobile Publisher,” a look at how publishers are tackling challenges in the shift to mobile, from design to content to monetization... People may spend most of their mobile screen time on apps, but the vast majority of that time is spent on just five apps. Meantime, publishers that haven’t invested in mobile a…

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…

Facebook is a weird beast that a lot of journalists still don't understand. That is because it has taken the definition of "news" back to the era before mass media even existed. Yet, as a business, it looks exactly like a mass-media company and competes aggressively for the same advertising budgets... Facebook's flirtation with journalism wasn't d…

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.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

No longer will I read or give attention to hyper partisan news entities or the conservative echo chamber... I remember not long ago when tragic events used to bring us together as a nation. Now because of increasingly powerful and extreme echo chambers on the right and left these events tear us apart...In the clickbait era, media entities, aggrega…

how newsrooms make decisions about what stories to supply their communities... using processes and mental models designed for the pre-internet era ...in an age where individuals are empowered with access to seemingly-infinite content...to explain this complex issue ... why we made a comic instead

Gawker built a tool that pulls in the top 10 comment threads from its network of sites and displays them at the end of its Facebook Instant Articles... [and] Accelerated Mobile Pages... It’s not possible to comment straight on the Instant Article; people who want to add to the discussion have to log in on Gawker’s own sites. Disqus supports Googl…

Today, we’re announcing an update to News Feed that helps you see more posts from your friends and family.

Should we give the audience what they want?ORShould we give the audience what they need?...two flawed assumptions: 1. that newsrooms already know what audiences want and 2. that newsrooms can and should determine what their audience needs. The framing of these questions doesn’t leave room for members of the audience to actually speak for themselve…

“I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory,” ... to no avail. He called on his friends in the technology industry to act on this ‘echo-chamber problem’.... Why are they making the demand of social media companies — and not news organisations?...how we see technology now: both as something separate fro…

an organization dedicated to "ever closer union" has never faced a setback as profound as the looming departure from the UK, and it’s natural to wonder if this doesn’t mark the beginning of a larger unraveling.... Rather than a prediction or a hot take, here’s a way to think through the different alternatives.

“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.

How can project management help news outlets improve their workflow and manage their time and resources better?... the role of a product manager or developer will sometimes overlap with that of a project manager, Katharine Bailey, the outlet's head of news products, told Journalism.co.uk in a recent podcast.

In April, Medium rolled out a suite of new tools for publishers, and began giving a beta group the option to make revenue from the platform as well. I spoke with five of these publishers ...

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…

Allen tucked favorable mentions of prominent “Playbook” sponsors into his editorial offerings... a State Department official essentially ghost-wrote an item for “Playbook.”The skinny: Mike Allen ran a press-release mill for vested interests in Washington... a weekly sponsorship for the newsletter falls somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000... Ev…

It’s opening up its digital advertising shop for its subscribers, offering an inventory of sponsored content alongside its inventory of news stories... the AP has made the logical jump to a full-on mini agency... subscribers will be able to flick a switch and have the sponsored content show up nicely integrated on the page... surveys measuring…

How do you make analytics interesting and useful for a newsroom?... When the Missourian was able to integrate the new digital analytics platform Parse.ly into its analytics reporting, we saw an opportunity to make significant changes to the report going to the newsroom every week.

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…

Some 63% of marketers plan to increase their native advertising budgets this year... The Times launched its "T Brand Studio".. in 2014... has created more than 100 campaigns for more than 50 brands.. generated around $35.7 million. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed, which only sells native ads, generated revenue of $100 million in 2014, while Media Week estima…

The Atlantic expects native campaigns to drive 70 percent of its ad revenue this year, up from 60 percent in 2015... the NYTimes’ branded content division, T Brand Studio, now includes 70 staffers and will “deliver more than $50 million in revenue this year,” up from an estimated $35 million in 2014

The Washington Post introduces its new Global Opinions section which greatly expands The Post’s mix of viewpoints by adding contributing columnists and fresh voices from major regions across the world. The initiative first launches in Europe... expert commentary, editorials and op-eds from writers in the region as well as interviews with world lea…

Distro lets anyone transform an HTML article into the format mandated by one of the various platforms.

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…

This year's report reveals new insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of over 50,000 online news consumers in 26 countries including the US and UK.The report suggests that publishers across the world are facing unprecedented levels of disruption to business models and formats from a combination of the rise of social platf…

the Post is employing a concept called “laddering,” converting unique visitors into paying customers by getting them to increase social engagement with its website.

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 …