Overview: Media

The Wall Street Journal, claims it has been the Journal’s fastest-growing social channel, reaching over 2 million followers since it launched on the Japanese app 15 months ago... Publishers like The Economist, BBC and Mashable have all added Line to their social media arsenal

"It tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline."

Advertisers have to spend $250,000 in native plus display over 60 days (up from the minimum BrandVoice package of $150,000). If they don’t get a lift in at least one of four metrics (awareness, favorability, recall, purchase intent), they get their money back.

At work here is what is called, variously, “social syndication” or “traffic exchange,” a technique increasingly in vogue among publishers looking to get their articles and brands in front of other readers ... help them extend the reach ... fill in the gaps in their own social programming with stories that they didn’t or couldn’t write themselves

The Conversation U.S. saw 540,000 unique visitors to its main site last month, but because all of its pieces are published under a Creative Commons license ... it’s reached an audience of 5.5 million... recently announced 19 public and private research universities across the U.S. as its “founding partners.” ... pay a yearly fee and get access to…

“Innovation is not just a cool thing. It’s not just a process. It’s a culture. We research. We design. We build.” Innovation should not compete with the daily grind of the company, it must emerge from it

we’re seeing early signs that the value of a mobile user is greater than a desktop user... Facebook’s... shift from desktop to mobile has led to much higher engagement and average revenue... exactly the opposite of what everyone predicted. investing millions in rich video experiences... But isn’t a larger screen more immersive than a small mobil…

Platforms are eating publishers... The idea that Facebook and its ilk could act as information gatekeepers is also a bleak prospect... Facebook wouldn’t allow The New Republic to create an ad for an innocuous piece on medical marijuana ... If Facebook is squeamish about medical marijuana now, imagine the state of the fourth estate once controversy…

The time has come for The Guardian to make it on its own. Last week, the paper laid out a three-year plan to cut 20 percent of its losses... a re-vamped membership scheme, centralized data teams and a new ad model focusing on video and branded content. Here’s how the Guardian can drive a profit.

the new application is to deliver a round-up of curated news stories to readers, meant to be viewed first thing in the morning ... presented on eight different cards... the app’s content is able to be digested fairly quickly. Users can ... clicking a link to view the longer article, but they can also just use Refinery29 This AM to flip through car…

Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton was an extreme skeptic of publishers relying too heavily on Facebook. Now he's ... “all in” on publishing directly to Facebook with its Instant Articles program, a backtracking on Denton’s well-publicized lament that publishers are too reliant on platforms...Facebook, with its deep pool of accurate user data, can help …

Nice HTML5 process explainer

BuzzFeed has mastered the art of distributed publishing... 5 billion views per month ... across 30 platforms, from Facebook to Pinterest to Snapchat. In a month it does 3 billion video views, less than 5 percent of which are on BuzzFeed.com.... But BuzzFeed must navigate a thorny transition... What’s the ROI of (brand) cat videos? Marketers al…

what started as a cynical in-joke has become a bad habit, and an excuse for enabling abuse across the web... The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable... we denigrate a form that use…

The 12-person unit, called the social stories team, includes a variety of roles: writers, animators, graphics professionals, and producers, who create and package content for Instagram, Vine, Tumblr and Snapchat Discover.

For journalists, Facebook Live “is a really new way for them to connect,” says Facebook product manager Vadim Lavrusik. “The magic of Live is it's interactive. The people who are viewing the broadcast are just as much a part of it.”

legacy magazine has partnered with WNYC to launch an hour-long radio show ... introduced a metered paywall ... continued to attract sponsors and big names to its annual citywide weekend of panel discussions, interviews and performances.... an Amazon series premieres on February 16...

Coda’s mission is to “stay on the story” after mainstream media leaves a crisis region... We pick crises that are consequential and complex, and that can’t be understood through sporadic flashes of attention... the site won’t be trying to keep up with breaking news...watch things unfurl at the pace of evolving trends rather than daily development…

We first noticed how Trump stories drove traffic—and thus revenue—at TheStreet.com last summer... if a website earns $20 for every thousand page views, it can make, say, $20,000 on a Trump story, but only $2,000 on an article about Cruz, Clinton, Sanders or Rubio... giving him even greater leverage over the media... even the smallest items of Tru…

“We can’t cede the social world to large companies.”... discussed the Times’ attitude toward commenters and shared the results of a Times survey that asked commenters why they comment:... News organizations, he said, need to make building community around news more of a priority. (Though, of course, that’s easy for an editor from the Times to s…

Three months into Dialog, I’m excited to say we’ve succeeded in creating a well-lit place for thoughtful, live conversations between the Digg community and the people who make the best stuff on the Internet... Clear community guidelines work. Pre-moderation works. And most of all, the amount of personalized attention we’re willing to give each use…

Another 13 U.K. publishers are signed up to start using Facebook’s Instant Articles, including The Daily Telegraph, The Mirror, The Daily Mail and The Economist, Sky News, sports site 90min.com and The Sun.The BBC and the Guardian were the first U.K. partners, and there are plenty more waiting in the wings.

Neat idea, if not exactly being exploited by many

Ultimately, what publishers and advertisers care about most, however, is how much quality time a person spends with a story. To judge that, publishers are developing newer metrics like “time spent” reading, “scroll depth,” “engagement,” “recirculation,” “shares,” and “percentage of article completed.”

With independent journalism increasingly looking like an endangered species, a EU communication strategy that helped European media build the European Public Sphere would be a smarter longterm move than propaganda and brochureware

The might of Google and Facebook in the digital market, combined with structural changes such as the growth of mobile, which is proving harder to monetise than print, has increased the pace of change since last summer... Guardian Labs, its branded content division launched in 2014, to “make a far, far greater contribution” over the next three yea…

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…

The European Political Strategy Centre gathered a select group of leading international academics to provide input to the ongoing public consultation on a regulatory environment for online platforms.