Overview: Media

A useful look at how user-centricity has leapt out of the web department and into the business strategy: "... Quartz ... Gawker, BuzzFeed and Tumblr... are increasingly thinking about what they do as providing a service, not just as a business that generates content and then delivers it to people.... you have to experiment, and iterate rapidly, …

"Today, we have seen the proliferation of new news ventures thanks to some fortuitous changes in the funding environment, such as venture capitalists, tech philanthropists, and big companies willing to take a chance on actual content produced by journalists as opposed to funding platforms or aggregators. And they all have mission statements speaki…

"This is a Big Deal for a lot of people right now, because the software companies that support our social lives have become so evil and pervasive and controlling in recent years." - What Does Ethical Social Networking Software Look Like? — The Message — Medium

Last year I decided to get Information Overload under control, setting up a GTD system with a DoIt-driven morning routine and Pocket, Diigo and IFTTT to queue, store and share useful stuff. I was all set. For what, I wasn't sure. But I was sure as hell organised. And then, a couple of days ago, an article on Aeon - What good is information? -…

"What's fascinating about Longform isn't its success... but how it went from a fairly simple website to an ambitious world-changing platform by nothing more than user feedback. No abstract theories... Just the simple power of going iteratively from MVP to a product people want... the new Longform app allows you to follow individual writers' wor…

"The New York Times today introduced “Watching,” a major new feature on the NYTimes.com homepage on desktop and on the mobile website. Watching is a stream of developing and noteworthy news designed to amplify the scope and urgency of The Times’s digital report. Watching offers a tailored feed of the news of the moment, such as early outlines of …

As commented on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/New-Narrative-Europe-closing-event-4203563.S.5916497700450234368), a poll with an interesting set of options to choose from: "Do you: a) Love Europe as a state of mind? b) Love Europe as a solution to the challenges we face together? c) Love Europe for its victory over the barriers which o…

Great piece on corporate journalism from the FT. "The Richmond Standard is one of the more polished sites to emerge in the age of hyper-local digital news brands such as Patch and DNAinfo.com... it is run and funded by Chevron, the $240bn oil group which owns the Richmond refinery that in August 2012 caught fire... sending more than 15,000 reside…

"think-tanks, the semi-academic institutions that come up with ideas for politicians [are] increasingly doing journalism—not just blogging and tweeting but foreign reporting, too. Deskbound journalists, meanwhile, are embracing data and spreadsheets." Really? Think tanks are basically glorified PR firms for political movements/parties, so this mo…

"Corporations are tempted to take over journalism with increasingly better contents. ... dangers and hopes for new revenue streams." Interesting figures on the decline in journalists and the rise of PR specialists, cause by 2 trends: "while the journalistic staffing is shrinking dramatically ... the public relation crowd is rising in a spectacul…

"a new paper by Harvard's Yochai Benkler ... on what Wikileaks reveals about the emergence of a networked modern press... Wikileaks "forces us to ask how comfortable we are with the actual shape of democratization created by the Internet." ... how the public responds is a particularly compelling force. "The people formerly known as the audience"…

"...another link in a chain of legal rulings that help establish the idea that bloggers - and other members of ... "the networked fourth estate," ... can be seen as performing acts of journalism... we need to protect acts of journalism, not just specific actors who engage in them. the First Amendment protects acts of journalism or publishing — …

Written for journalists, but good for brand journalism & gov comms, where content is usually unfailingly sunny or relentlessly bleak: "Studies show that stories which explore solutions to problems rather than just the problems themselves prompt audiences to engage with the news and share ... the media should also pay attention to the responses p…

Others have written on the return of the enewsletter, but I don't think anyone saw it as the home page: "Yes, the homepage is still dead, which is why our new front door is quite different from most. ... we are offering an efficient briefing on global business news, ... intended to be read straight through, like a well written memo from a trusted…

Not all shortform content is clickbait - Chartbeat thinks Circa shouldn't worry. "The depressing truth of the Internet is that short-form content hangs out on the same end of the distribution curve of the Internet as long form when it comes to attention. ... the majority of pageviews get fewer than 15 seconds of engagement. Facebook is looking …

"more publishers are trying to opt out of the pageview rat race.... The Financial Times will next month begin selling time by the hour for any ad ... The Economist Group is rolling out a new set of “dynamic attention metrics” to help advertisers buy time rather than impressions for their ads."... The rise of clickbait ... can be tracked back to …

"Danielle Jones and Miki King have been named executive vice president for expansion and executive vice president for operations, respectively. Jones, who has been with POLITICO since its first year and was most recently deputy editor in chief, will lead POLITICO's expansion efforts into other states as well as the previously announced European …

"There's no clickbait, there's no fluff, no listicles... just articles." Apparently the new app "scours the Internet for content published by both news outlets and writers..." - but until they launch the Android & Web app (underway) I won't know if it involves semantic analysis... But: "the [article] publishers ... will get pageviews, as art…

"... It goes by many other pseudonyms — “native advertising,” “content marketing” — but the basic value proposition in most cases is the same. Publishers work with sponsors to create content that is “native” to the particular platform (in some cases looking very similar to editorial content) and is more engaging than display advertising.... This…

As I mentioned in my previous post, the past couple of years have seen a lot of innovation in online content strategy, coupled with growing disenchantment with "Big Internet".

Fascinating overview of a journalism sector in freefall, spotted literally 10 minutes before I saw the news that Libération is to axe one third of its jobs. Which makes this a great opening sentence: "Of all the papers and newsmagazines in France, one in particular should have been well prepared for the challenges of this digital era: Libération.…

"Libération is losing €22,000 a day. We have to streamline journalistic production." Libération's newsstand sales have fallen by 20% over the past year, and its editorial team is to be reorganised in order to boost the digital version. Le Monde ... is also switching 35 staff from print to online." - Libération to cut a third of its workforce to…

"The process of placing an ad on News Feed is a complicated dance. Facebook has to decide not only which ad to show to its users, but when to show it to them... any given user has around 1,500 stories they could see each day. ... a rather complex algorithm that weights how engaging each post is ... and a wide range of other signals ... For examp…

The first of 4 (so far!) posts on "PoliticoEU" by EurActiv's founder/publisher Christophe Leclercq: "This new attempt is by two large companies with a lot of money and with professional teams. A difference with some, but not all, previous attempts. And an asset but potentially also a curse, depending on answering 10 key questions." - EuRoman…

"Politico is launching a European edition ... with ... Axel Springer... to cover “not just Brussels but European politics and policy more broadly,”" CJR sees a few problems ahead: "- the 28 member countries have distinct identities and interests, so a one-size-fits-all outlet does not necessarily fit anyone... - the European Union has no shared…

"Marketers and PR professionals are hard-wired to put the product/company first. Journalists put the consumer first.... journalists should be in the box seat when it comes to running a newsroom - be it for the media or a brand." plus 5 or 6 more reasons, spelt out here - Why a journalist should run your brand newsroom | LinkedIn

"Displaying data can be a tricky proposition, because different rules apply in different contexts. A sales director presenting financial projections to a group of field reps wouldn’t visualize her data the same way that a design consultant would in a written proposal to a potential client. So how do you make the right choices for your situation? …

"Facebook seems to be trying to get more transparent about how the algorithms ... function, with a statement on Monday about cracking down on “clickbait.” ... But despite the attempts at openness, the bottom line remains the same: Facebook is a black box. No one really has any clue why the site chooses to show or hide certain content... what com…

"Few pieces of journalism — let alone narrative journalism — effect change in a matter of hours. But that’s what happened with “Working Anything but 9 to 5,” ... A rare combination of intimate narrative and exposé, Kantor’s Aug. 13 story followed a tumultuous month in the life of Jannette Navarro, a young single mother struggling to make ends me…

"I honestly doubt that there is an algorithm in the world that can reliably surface such unexpected content, so well. An algorithm ... cannot surface unexpected, diverse and sometimes weird content exactly because of how algorithms work: they know what they already know.... Twitter brims with human judgment, and the problem with algorithmic filte…