Overview: Media

For The Atlantic, sponsored content has proved better ROI than other ad formats. Native advertising is estimated to reach around 75 percent of The Atlantic’s ad revenue this year, up 15 percent from 2015... a spectrum of native ads, from video to infographics to text-based editorial pieces

At The Guardian’s Media Summit in London, those publishers and others discussed what’s working for them with their platform strategies, and how sustainable off-site publishing is likely to be for media companies in the long term... Cosmo’s Snapchat Discover editions get 76 percent completion rates... 56 percent ... coming back to us five days …

EurActiv.com is opening one of its media innovations to other media interested in increasing competitiveness through translated syndication. (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 with Mathew…

Also called native advertising, sponsored content borrows the look, the name recognition, and even the staff of its host publication to push brand messages on unsuspecting viewers... the line between what’s sponsored and what isn’t—between advertising and journalism—has already been rubbed away. who would bother pitching a story to The Atlantic …

SOMETHING REALLY DRAMATIC is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism ... without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. news publishers have lost control over distribution... increase in power of social media companies... a far greater concentration of power ... Networks favor economies of scale,…

Comments on our own content create real community and offer vital feedback to content creators and consumers both. And thus, we should fight for them to be better. Comments are not just a nice-to-have but a core part of a media site’s mission... Lots of broken comment systems are designed for a platonic ideal of how people ought to behave.... Can …

Civil Comments, a commenting platform ... aims to produce respectful dialogue in comment sections through a system that crowdsources comment moderation... Commenters are shown two random comments from elsewhere on the site, and must rate the comments’ quality and civility and determine whether they include harassment, abuse, or personal attacks. T…

the Guardian is a great newspaper whose survival should concern us all... Digital revenues, which had been predicted to increase to £100m in the current financial year, are stuck at around £80m, while advertising print revenues have declined by about 20 per cent... Nor could anyone dispute that the Guardian’s website has been highly successful. I…

ProPublica, for example, has always encouraged others to “steal its stories” — which has both increased pageviews and resulted in thousands of sites reprinting their pieces. I see Creative Commons licensing as a smart way to distribute local or national content when the goal is maximum impact... [and] as an important survival tool for smaller an…

The module formerly known as Watching is linking out less than it used to, but the Times says it still believes in curating... we are just trying to figure out the right balance between New York Times stories and outside sources; how to offer smart, meaningful curation to our readers.

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…

But how did Belgium find itself at the center of a burgeoning terrorist network? Here are a few sources of reading to help you get a clearer picture.

It's not just science reporters who need to evaluate research and learn to tell good studies from bad... perhaps the biggest challenge facing today’s science journalists: Evaluating and interpreting complex and sometimes contradictory results at a time when so many news stories... rely on a fairly sophisticated understanding of science. That make…

she and her team record real audio and motion capture data, then work it into a digital recreation of an event. It's an unusual technique that lets people not just see an event, but explore it.

News is a product... our news products must be good and targeted to succeed. They must know who their users are, what they need, how they need it, and deliver a satisfying experience. That is what a product manager does... thinking about what users ... need from the whole of that product; what their experience of it is like; how it could be more c…

Email, for all the claims of it being dead, is critical for many publishers as a distribution (and marketing) channel they continue to control... Email newsletters have become an important part of publishers’ audience development strategies as a way to deepen their relationship with readers by providing an antidote to the endless stream of news in…

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…

To understand what makes BuzzFeed tick, you need to know how Dao Nguyen thinks about data... As the value of content approaches zero, "Having technology, data science, and being able to know how to manage, optimize and coordinate your publishing is the thing that gives you a competitive advantage"... One myth is data scientists are telling report…

sometimes people post disagreeable or disturbing content that does not violate Facebook's policies. This paper explores the potential of community-driven counter-speech to play a critical role in challenging and diminishing these type of posts on social media. Counter-speech is a common, crowd-sourced response to extremism or hateful content... F…

Berners-Lee suggested a simple rethink in how social networks and human nature work together could help curtail negative behaviour... "we have responsibility to think how to build systems that tend to produce constructive criticism and harmony as opposed to negativity and bullying."

the press help shed sunlight on the inner workings of government, expose flaws and problems in our system, and inform the citizenry, making journalism a cornerstone of a healthy democracy... explanatory journalism... is particularly worthy of attention for its role in improving public knowledge and contributing to a more informed populace.The vide…

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 …