Overview: Media

I've been invited to prepare a "Technology Buyer Challenge" on Hashtag Platform for the Language Technology Industry Summit this May. (Update, 31/3/16: this project was covered, among many other things, in an interview with professional EU interpreter Alexander Drechsel in his podcast Demos ex machina? Multilingual communication wit…

"So you think “President Trump” is the worst case scenario?" - Some thoughts, originally on my oldblog and then updated on Medium:

Democrats and Republicans sometimes seem to be living in two different Americas. We analyzed the past seven debates on each side to show which topics are most discussed within each party (nice, simple data visualisation here)

So you think "President Trump" is the worst case scenario? The rise of American authoritarianism provides the best article I've read explaining the Rise of Trump, even if it's a bit longer than previous favourites. It covers psychological research into authoritarianism, the profile characterized by a desire for order and a fear…

A short post on the financial costs of not having a European Public Sphere.

if he tried to make ads that were beautiful and perfect, it wouldn’t work and his fans would know... his work routinely pulls in millions of views because he’s transparent with his audience... mostly teenage boys know when they’re being peddled a product.

Great explainer video - accompanying article here.

the Digiday explainer for explanatory journalism... An article about the latest incremental development in [any] situation may be inscrutable to readers who haven’t been following ... Explanatory journalism aims to demystify those complex topics by providing that context.

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 …

Why are explainers suddenly so popular?... Explainers should create “a scaffold of understanding that future reports can attach to”... a counterpart to the endless streams of headlines, posts and tweets that are how most digital natives find their news today.

if news content focuses on the ‘Who, What, When, and Where,’ explainer journalism looks to inform the reader of the ‘How and Why’... give the reader background information about a story to ensure that they are able to properly understand events as they unfold... Explainer journalism enables the media provider to at least show some intelligence an…

The institutional brand building you create by having your journalists be great on social platforms cannot be underestimated. Part of having your journalists on these platforms is giving them the freedom to be a normal human being, not a robot, a PR machine or a slave to the wire.

As newsrooms disappear, veteran reporters are being forced from the profession. That’s bad for journalism—and democracy...  In 2007, there were 55,000 full-time journalists at nearly 1,400 daily papers; in 2015, there were 32,900,..  doesn’t include the buyouts and layoffs last fall...  what remains of print journalism is shifting, morphing i…

Enter the new editors of the Internet: giant, centralized tech companies that have created platforms... notably Facebook and Apple — want to be the newsstands of tomorrow: the place we go, inside their own ecosystems, to get our news and information... journalism organizations feel they have no alternative but to be part of those ecosystems. This …

Times are tough for Web publishers... The common threats facing the industry have made partnering up with competitors an easier sell. This collaboration has taken many forms...

"AMP is not just about news and not just about articles" ... going forward, the focus will be on new creative ad experiences... highly compelling interactive experiences within the format ... this needs to be easy to implement ... seen a lot of organizations with small engineering teams implement this into their homegrown CMSes within a few days…

Despite ... the belief of many publishers that online ad revenue would surely replace offline, the per-view price of a digital ad continues to drop, and ever-more ad dollars are concentrated with Google and Facebook. Now, to boot, there are ad blockers... paywalls as an alternative revenue stream has, other than for a few must-have titles, produce…

seen as its answer to the walled garden of Facebook’s Instant Articles... in tests, AMP pages loaded 85 percent faster than regular Web pages... We know faster pages are going to do better in mobile search; why would we not do everything we can do make it faster?”

Instant Articles, meet Instant Ads... an immersive way to reach people without making them leave the social network... when users click a Facebook News Feed ad connected to Canvas, it opens a full-screen, rich media page inside of Facebook rather than forcing users to wait for a mobile website to load... removes constraints that low-power mobile s…

My sadly underwhelmed response to @sidewireinc’s gr8 “Today’s Internet is Optimized for Noise”

top 100 stories of the year, ranked ... by the total length of time people spent reading them... We wanted to see what cross-over this list might have with the biggest New York Times stories on Facebook... We recorded 28 stories in both top 100 lists...36 of the top 100 most shared stories were from the editorial and opinion pages, far more than a…

Axel Springer, wary of being overly dependent on third-party platforms for traffic... fighting back by launching its own news aggregator platform... now has around 1,200 publishers on board ... Digiday spoke with Würtenberger, CEO of Upday, about using humans and algorithms for news sourcing, creating a platform for publishers and banning ad block…

Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services... social engagement could solve the conversion challenge ... users enjoy free content that the website provides but are unwilling to contribute to the site monetarily. The bad news is that it’s not enough to just add participatory optio…

Brands have always had a tougher time spreading messages on Facebook than individuals, because they’re playing in a space that’s fundamentally not designed for them... What if our kids find the idea of any brands communicating as if they’re people even more awkward than we do? there are opportunities to re-think the role publishing plays in soci…

Asking humans to judge each other can be a surprisingly powerful thing... But invoking a sense of being watched isn’t the only way platforms subliminally encourage social behaviour... persuasive design: if you want people to do something, don’t explain why, just show them how... If extremists seek to spread fear and shock, counterspeech might aim…

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…

a phone company, Three, is introducing adblocking across its network.... Mobile advertising is still a very small revenue stream for most publishers, but in many cases it is the only one showing any growth...Unless and until this is killed by the European regulators, it threatens to snuff out the lifeline of mobile advertising for digital publishe…

From Kickstarter’s April 2009 launch through the end of the year, 17 journalism projects received funding. That number more than tripled just a year later ... 168 funded projects in 2014 and 173 in the first nine months of 2015... from $49,256 in 2009 and $263,352 in 2010 to $1,743,668 in the first nine months of 2015... number of people contribu…

This is a completely new way to launch a media startup,... Most startups start with VC funding or a foundation grant or corporate support and then go chasing after an audience. But our crowdfunding approach means that #EmergingUS will be built on an audience of thousands... treated as real stakeholders. They'll play a big role in shaping the cont…

What if we viewed investigative reporting more broadly ... used our skills (and the financial resources of many investigative teams) to bring people together to solve problems?... The Tribune didn’t just report on what scientists were doing. We came to them with an ambitious idea, connected them to other top researchers and then became an impor…