Overview: Media

Last Thursday I finally caught up with Eric Maurice of PressEurop, which recently had its plug pulled by the EC following their decision to cancel its renewal tender some weeks after publishing it.

"As we enter a new year we have crowdsourced a checklist of 10 vital skills for journalists to produce digital content in the most effective ways ... We hope that the mix of skills, techniques and qualities listed below would help journalists to stay ahead of the game in terms of digital innovation, be able to harness the latest tools and techniq…

Apparently, and hopefully, we're seeing: "the end of a print media era defined by high-brow broadsheets and low-brow tabloids. Today, the idea of what constitutes “respectable” media is in flux as the online heirs to the tabloid tradition produce more quality stories and traditional outlets like the New York Times even look to them for inspiratio…

You can go for months without a good post on the EU public sphere, and then a whole bunch come along at once.

"whole new publishing and technology system ... continually iterate on the site and take advantage of new technology trends ... instead of seeing major redesigns in the future, users will see more incremental changes" Key question: are the native ads clearly ads? - New York Times redesign points to future of online publishing - Jan. 8, 2014

Great longread. Some excerpts: 1) It's a serious problem: "these online offenses are enough to make a woman want to click away from Twitter, shut her laptop, and power down her phone. Sometimes, we do withdraw: Pew found that from 2000 to 2005, the percentage of Internet users who participate in online chats and discussion groups dropped from 28…

“Comments from readers are probably one of the thorniest problems for online publishers of all kinds… and the methods for dealing with them are all over the map... We spoke to online editors and community managers at 104 news organisations from 63 countries across the globe, plus a selection of experts from the corporate and academic worlds to id…

Interesting survey of HuffPo, Techcrunch & other experiences with changing commenting systems and policies. - HuffPost policy banishes trolls — and drives away some frequent commenters | Poynter.

An alternative to Popular Science's approach: "Climate change articles trigger some of the most heated discussions on Ars Technica... a scientific matter with political ramifications, it's also the focus of astroturfers (fake grassroots movements), trolls, and the willfully scientifically illiterate. At Ars, we take trolling very seriously... we…

"If you have been following European politics and media, online and offline, for the past 5-6 years, you cannot but notice the genesis of a European Public Sphere . This sphere may be more or less evolved depending on national media, but it clearly there, much more than it was before the last European elections and the before the start of the cris…

"we essentially write new content that we then throw away at the end of the day. Content shouldn’t die by design... topical contexualization... means guiding readers through large, convoluted news topics. ProPublica’s topic pages get us closer to contextualizing huge topics. For every major series that they cover over time, there’s a landing page…

How nice to see a positive answer to the perennial question: Where are the MEPs?

Terrific article: "people are more likely to be moved by information that challenges their prejudices if they’re prevented from responding to it straightaway and it has time to sink in, to steep... On social media... the person you disagree with isn’t just misinformed but moronic, corrupt, evil. Complaints become rants. Rants become diatribes... …

Basically sums up why I want a Hub, not just a stream, for my virtual presence: "If I had my way, Facebook would have a hard and fast expiration date for posts. I generally don’t want most of what I say hanging around longer than I’d keep eggs in the fridge. Sure, some links and videos are worth revisiting—but does anyone really care that I was t…

Came out just after my post on applying network theory and the EU online public sphere: "For those of us who are interested in understanding and participating in the EU digital public sphere(s), social network analysis offers a useful way to identify key influencers and map different communities. I can see plenty of practical applications (for e…

An unfortunately accurate corrective to the recent "Facebook is dying" meme. 2013 truly was the year everyone just couldnt be arsed checking the facts: "A British academic studying social media found that young people use lots of new-fangled services, such as Instagram, because their parents are on Facebook. “What we’ve learned from working with …

Nothing new, but then it's 2013 review time: "this was the year someone isolated the DNA of the viral story, and the world ... saw for the first time the awesome potential of viral content ... Upworthy had about seventy-five thousand [Facebook] likes per article, twelve times more than fourth-place BuzzFeed. Among them were posts like the one wh…

The above image is from Drake Baer's FastCompany article "Why Successful People Have So Many Groups Of Friends", which is all about networking for career success, something I've never done and am very unlikely to start.

Maybe EU hoax stories can be useful ... An interesting take from Nieman Journalism Lab on the value viral hoax stories can bring to conversations on complex topics. The point being that the hoax would not have gone viral in the first place if it did not touch upon a complex, important topic in some way: "Yet at the same time, these strings of …

"For those of you not familiar with native advertising, it refers to a publication serving up paid stories and editorial content the same way. You’ll hear this technique also referred to as sponsored content and branded journalism. With no one clicking on banner ads, publications hope to find economic salvation in native advertising. But here’s …

"We've never had this much access to information ... Making it meaningful, discoverable & accessible is simultaneously the media’s toughest challenge and greatest opportunity... In 2014, we can do a better job of connecting with each other, sharing the tools that are out there and working on the problems yet to be solved in ways that make the mo…

"Semantic web, social network analysis, entity extraction, and news-as-API ... nerd stuff, but it will become important — a few news projects are already working on it. If they can prove these ideas can be good for business, others will follow." Nieman Journalism Lab with a few trenchant views on reinvigorating news in S. America, of which only o…

The rapid evolution in newsmedia provides a lot of ideas for better content strategies in a less organisational, more networked society. One such concept is ideas-based, or fluid, beats for journalism: "... a way for reporters to be human-centric rather than newsroom- or bureaucracy-centric", according to the latest piece in Niemanlab's Journalis…

#Context emerging as 2014 theme: "...newsrooms are going to reframe our understanding of “responsive design.” We’re going to see content move beyond simply responding to screen size and instead respond to reader context, adapting to behavior." - Nieman Journalism Lab

How nice to see the Brussels Bubble meme continue to spread ... ;) "In a damning indictment of efforts in Brussels to promote stronger public attachment to the EU through the European Year of Citizens 2013, Emily O’Reilly said the campaign was “not succeeding”. ... the new office holders needed to be courageous enough to address the union’s demo…

One of the reasons I created this Tumblr was to use it as a 'first draft’ of a Content Hub (see post), an idea which crystallised after reading Sloan’s original content strategy piece on Stock and Flow.The Hub is basically my way of saying that there’s more to life than the Stream. Unsurprisingly, Alexis Madrigal’s piece in the Atlantic caught my …

Today's online news environment is ideal for spreading bullshit. As someone like HuffPo's Washington bureau chief puts it: “If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentive…

Data-driven storytelling, sharable journalism in a British skunkworks. What's not to like? From NiemanLab: "Data-driven storytelling and web-native, sharable journalism are two of the biggest trends in media at the moment. If you locked the two together in a room, Ampp3d might walk out the door ... As a news site, Ampp3d keeps its output fairly …

This video is aimed at developers interested in combining machine translation, automatic semantic analysis, human curation, faceted and federated search, and social media to create a machine-assisted multilingual longform content curation engine.

Gratifyingly, the preview of the Hashtag Europe wireframes seemed to do the job, and allow people to understand just what this tool could do...