Overview: Media

"One of the standout features of the recent resurgence of email newsletters from news outlets has been a focus on providing an aggregated experience that encompasses what other publications produce.... the idea is to pick the best and most relevant content, whether it comes from their own stable or someone else's... by producing the highest qual…

"a lot of great content was getting lost in the shuffle, because there weren't enough discovery tools... when a user pulls up the topic picker, each choice reveals other sub-topics that might be of interest. Flipboard used to offer 30 topics, but now it offers a total of 34,000 ... it's deep topic analysis - we use it to surface what other p…

Perhaps a glimpse of Axel Springer's plans for @politicoEU? "Publishers set the prices for how much each of their articles cost, and keep 70 percent of the revenue generated from those stories. Blendle takes the other 30 percent. " - The New York Times Co. and Axel Springer are investing €3 million in Dutch startup Blendle » Nieman Journalism Lab

"Swarmize enables journalists to tell new, collaborative stories by making use of real-time data collection and visualisation" Just the tests they've already done are awesome. The code's on GitHub. Think to use in surveys, real-time social media monitoring, live blogs ... anything where real-time is useful and/or you might want a second bite at t…

"we are kicking off the relaunch of The Lede with a three-part series on content strategy... we begin with an element of content strategy that often gets overlooked … but that is crucial to understanding your audience intimately enough to influence it." Hint: it's AUDIENCE. And it's a podcast, so grab it and give it a listen tomorrow morning on y…

"Facebook say that the more time users spend at its site, the more likely there will be a robust exchange of diverse viewpoints and ideas shared online. Others fear that users will create their own echo chambers, and filter out coverage they do not agree with. ... [that] “is when you get conspiracy theories.” - How Facebook Is Changing the Way It…

"publishers [could] simply send pages to Facebook ... hosted by its servers ... with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared. That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers... Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns." - Facebook Offers Li…

"The Post’s suite of Web apps presents a more specialized alternative to traditional do-it-all content management systems like Drupal... Currently in development at The Post is an application tentatively titled “Storybuilder,” ... including a feature ... to create an index of facts associated with each story. Using this index, Storybuilder could…

"The news media sector has become heavily dependent on traffic from Facebook and Google. A reliance now dangerously close to addiction. Maybe it’s time to refocus on direct access... Which company in the world wouldn’t be seen as fragile when depending so much on a small set of uncontrollable distributors? for a news, value-added type media, the…

After the standard survey of Facebook's impact on news & democracy, an interesting analysis of the way Facebook's: "trending topics has had a deeply pernicious effect on the way news is produced... encourages publications to look for what's trending and pump out something on that subject as quickly as possible... lots of quickly aggregated p…

“Go in and add some information, thank them for finding mistakes, thank them for adding information on their own ... You want to have a dialogue with them.” Well, duh. - Eight best practices for journalists who reply to online comments | Current.org

"There are three simple cardinal rules of being an ethical aggregator:" ... and because I'm following them, please click on the link below to discover what they are. - We're all aggregators now : Columbia Journalism Review

"trying to game the algorithm doesn’t work, and that the only real secret to getting lots of interaction from Facebook for your content is to create and post great content (this was always Google’s argument as well). But what is great content? ... is it clickbait that drives people to share, or is it in-depth analysis of important topics?... by g…

Th@e new Guardian Visuals team will bring together ... the graphics desk, picture desk, interactive team and parts of the digital design and multimedia teams... it's hard to assemble teams that are cross-disciplinary ... and have the right combination of designers, developers, graphic artists, photographers." - Guardian forms new editorial teams…

Interesting bet on curation: "“Watching” ... aggregates breaking news updates from the Times and across the web 24 hours a day... a cross between a constantly updating wire feed and an in-house Twitter stream of stories Times staffers are keeping an eye on... a carefully filtered window into rest of the world of news, all with the NYT stamp of ap…

"A newsroom typically contains reporters, editors, data journalists, developers, designers … But traditionally they work in separate departments, unable to seamlessly collaborate together. That’s why silos don’t work. Instead, there should be a horizontal of these newsroom archetypes to truly integrate the journalism with the tech." - J-teams, le…

"Collaboration on the web has always been a challenge. Beyond the typically one-dimensional CMS, other familiar tools such as Google Docs and Dropbox also fall short because they either lack multimedia support (Docs) or don’t offer a true version control system (Dropbox). Over the past year-and-a-half, however, a host of potential collaboration s…

"We already have The Upshot, Vox.com, Wonkblog, FiveThirtyEight and other policy-heavy news sites. This news space will get a touch more crowded early next year, when Politico launches “The Agenda.”... Given all the bureaucratic hives at Politico — “core” Politico, the magazine, “The Agenda” and Politico Pro — it’ll need as many executive editors…

"So if you too are just starting out with scraping, here are five of the most useful tools I’ve encountered while learning and working on my project." - Five data scraping tools for would-be data journalists | Knight Lab | Northwestern University

"When is a print advertorial a native ad? The Washington Post published an ad for Shell in Thursday’s print edition that it’s touting as its first native ad in print. Shell used the ad, which ran on A13, to tell readers about the work it’s doing to improve energy efficiency. A nearly identical version ran online." - The Washington Post takes its …

"Staff also emphasizes building relationships between readers and journalists... strengthen reader engagement by making writers, experts in their field, more visible to build a closer relationship between them and readers, and by encouraging readers to contribute with insights. (At De Correspondent, subscribers are “members” while comments are ref…

" The Independent... on the hunt for digital growth ... taking a page out of the book of digital native publishers with high-metabolism, social media-optimized content with the newly launched i100, a site heavy on visuals that offers social media-oriented twists on the news, explainers and viral Web commentary. The result: stories like “Has the Ry…

"Following on the heels of the Guardian and Metro UK, News UK has developed a Creative Content Unit to focus on native advertising... We've entered a new world where lines are fuzzier. The ethics shouldn't be fuzzy... If you're straight up and disclose who you are and where you're coming from, readers are mature enough to determine whether it's s…

"... a new way of measuring the actual attention of readers, as part of a move to get publishers and advertisers to stop focusing only on clicks and pageviews... Unlike pageviews, which simply measure whether a page has loaded, or even unique visitors ... metrics like “active exposure time,” ... can determine how much time a reader spent with a s…

If you care about EU democracy you need to care about European media, particularly as the upcoming US media invasion gets underway. They'll be pushing on an open door when they get to Brussels.

""How to stop trolling online?” is the question of the moment. From [Quora's] inception, its efforts have been geared towards “making quality scale,” ... also meant keep making the application a safe place for users to write... It has introduced a new anti-harassment feature, where users are prompted to flag any comment or post ... Quora moderat…

"“The best way to preserve editorially independent, high quality journalism is to preserve the business model. And I think the idea of branded content that shares a form factor with editorial is a great first step.”" - Going native at the Times | Capital New York

The seminal launch 538 launch post: "... while the first two steps of the process (collecting and organizing information in the form of news stories) are thought to fall within the province of “objective” journalism, explanatory journalism is sometimes placed in the category of “opinion journalism.” ... [which] doesn’t seem to abide by the standa…

"Over the past 18 months, Mashable — helped along by a $14 million infusion of capital — has doubled in size ... announced its first international expansion... [and] opened a Los Angeles office Mashable chose London because it’s a prime market for advertising" - Mashable, too, heads to Europe | Poynter.

"Roughly two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults use Facebook, and half of those users get news there — amounting to 30% of the general population. YouTube is the next biggest social news pathway ... users who arrive via Facebook spend far less time and consume far fewer pages than those who arrive directly. The same is true of users arriving by search..…