Overview: Media

the big media institutions knew that they really couldn’t leave their business models, they were locked in... there really is an open question to whether digital journalism will replace the profit margins of traditional journalism... one huge issue in journalism today is how a couple places, particularly Facebook, are becoming a major source of…

Text takes more thought and time. Writing is an inherently vulnerable act... numerous websites... demonstrate that long form writing can and does succeed on the internet... If text is to survive on the internet, sustainable structures need to be implemented to support it ... The next step is to have publishing and blogging platforms introduce “…

BuzzFeed is perhaps the most prominent outlet yet to promise sponsored content for political candidates.... will create and sell native advertising for office seekers in 2016, a potentially lucrative move in an election cycle that is expected to see $1 billion spent on digital ads, up from just $22 million in 2008. The move could herald in a new m…

In four of the six groups shown a native advertisement, the majority interpreted the piece as an article.

it is close to impossible to report well on the European Union. The bureaucratic monster only makes great news when it fails, and even then either you, your editor, or your audience will misunderstand the reasons why.

a new wave of “homeless” media companies that don’t require a home page; their sole purpose is to syndicate content.... With native content consumption on third-party platforms growing, will it still be relevant for media companies to invest significant resources on running and maintaining their websites and mobile apps?

Circa is indeed returning, but it won’t be the Circa its users remember.... “an independent digital news site aimed at the new generation,” building on the “intellectual property and technology of Circa News.”

On Thursday night, as part of its ongoing coverage of the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., The New York Times highlighted reader comments in one of its most prominent digital spaces: The top of its homepage... While Times journalists interact with readers on social platforms, the paper also makes an effort to bring the conversation back to …

So, optimistically, I guess, we build a new independent media on a bedrock of explaining and celebration and condemnation, with a side of antagonistic reporting (or hopefully more) and infinite essays and personal narratives bubbling underneath it all (and occasionally breaking through). - Access Denied - The Awl

most politics coverage is about politicians, not the things I care about and the actions I could take... Political journalism could imagine the audience as agents, people who act. Political journalism could be genuinely empowering, if it started from the concerns of the people it’s supposed to serve and not the spectacle of elections... In t…

Over 40 new resources ... some great longreads to enjoy as the nights grow long, the productivity tips you’ll need to find the time to read them, and a free set of steak knives. The Christmas season, after all, is almost upon us.

Back when she was a member of SEAL Team 6—Kristin Beck liked to grow her beard real long. But as disguises go, that was nothing compared with the life she lived as a man. What’s it take, and how does it feel, for a paragon of masculinity to travel so far to find her true self?

true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology—even nuclear weapons—and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction... Bostrom is arguably the leading transhumanist philosopher today... bringing order to ideas that might o…

Ray is a brilliant technologist, futurist, and director of engineering at Google focused on AI and language processing... of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990's, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be “essentially correct” (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunni…

Some people might be satisfied just to let each theory be used for what it is good for and to worry no further. But people like that do not become theoretical physicists. - The most beautiful theory | The Economist

... resembles a medieval reality show. Camera crews fan out across the caliphate every day, their ubiquitous presence distorting the events they purportedly document. Battle scenes and public beheadings are so scripted and staged that fighters and executioners often perform multiple takes and read their lines from cue cards... a media division …

NYTimes' “verified commenters.”... few hundred people whose comments are posted without moderation can end up dominating the reader commenting system... causes quite understandable resentment among thousands of others...Because they go up first, their comments are almost guaranteed to get the most exposure, “and hence rise to the top and be seen …

So is the world any more “outraged” than it’s always been? Nah. We’re just getting toyed with. - 5 things the media does to manufacture outrage. — Medium

focusing less on how audiences interact with content on the screen but more about how, because of stories, we engage with each other as a community. Less transaction, more relation; less on audience, more on community... in 2003 I launched the initial version of Interactive Narratives ... Finding inspiring multimedia work was one benefit. But f…

Americans say they want accuracy and impartiality, but the polls suggest ... most of us are seeking affirmation. Americans want the news to be patriotic ... The news media is most valued when it reflects our best selves... the Internet has ... enabled us to construct digital silos, battlements from which... we fire invective on the people below…

this week El País pulled the plug on Aguilar’s column after he told the New York Times that the Spanish newspaper’s financial problems were compromising its editorial line... there are people so exasperated that they’re leaving, sometimes even with the feeling that the situation has reached levels of censorship.” - El País goes to war with t…

People who advocate for comments on social media ... often argue that Twitter and Facebook engender higher-quality discussion in part because commenters are (usually) attached to real names ... [but] Twitter trolls are rampant, too. And a retweet or quick comment isn’t exactly the same as a thoughtful response. So recently we’ve seen a couple o…

Extinction-level events have more or less become the new normal in the news business... journalism should have been wiped out by now. And yet it’s surprisingly resilient ... necessary to step back from the #contentwars and start, well, building new things. Every minute spent debating whether bloggers are journalists... is time not spent making …

news operations  are... losing a degree of ownership over their audiences... the number of people they reach is potentially greater than ever [but] through much larger third parties... coming to terms with just how directly their industry’s business model is coming into competition with that of their new, and much larger, partners... The tec…

There's never been a better time to innovate in media, so it's good to be back to EurActiv. Eight years ago I helped launch BlogActiv, before leaving for the world of EU communications agencies. Give or take a month or two, my 6-month stint fell in the middle of EurActiv's 15 years of life so far. It's good to be back, albeit p…

In this week’s edition, a months’ reading - some 30 posts - on social media, digital transformation, content/system design and EuroPCom2015. But first some news from me

A quick post to Medium in response to: Facebook Will Be Every Publisher’s CMS And That Is Probably A Good Thing: For a publisher to adopt Facebook as their CMS would be a form of surrender, handing over their future to someone else. - I don’t know if you’re wrong, but I hope you are — Medium

I feel reasonably confident that within the next 6–12 months, you will only see Instant Articles in the mobile newsfeed. Why? Because they are better... they will eventually be available on all Facebook environments. There is seemingly nothing stopping Facebook from rolling out a full front-end to the product so writers can produce directly in …

Blog posts take hours to write, those great images need to be found or created and those social networks need to be managed and nurtured. It is often not done or persisted with because there are no apparent quick rewards. This is where the tortoise can beat the hare by slow persistence. It is a marathon and a journey not a sprint... you are bui…

The List App has already drawn interest from a slew of news organizations... We talked to audience development experts ... figure out which strategies appear to be working well and get a sense of the app’s possibilities... Posts that typically do well manage to be simultaneously entertaining and informative, combining a light tone with a list o…