Overview: Media

readers finished 94% of the longform pieces they started... with much faster download speeds and the advent of the tablet’s “lean back” reading experience, journalism has seen a rise in “longform” ventures... analytics offer an incomplete picture of reader behavior, and little real insight into how readers engage. Page views, entrances, ti…

A decent long read: on @medium, The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes: "Don’t feel constrained by presumed short attention spans. If you put in the effort, so will your audience." - The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes — Data Lab — Medium

"Thoughtful, longform content is king... A young, bare-bones website called Wait But Why is disproving the notion that thoughtful, long-form content and virality are mutually exclusive... monthly averages of 1.6 million uniques and 4.6 million page views... Its newsletter has over 106,000 subscribers... Its most viral article... has well ove…

"at some point, you start to crave something with more substance. Today’s readers want more than listicles and clickbait, and this is driving meaningful change across the digital publishing industry... In the maelstrom of Internet content, we are drawn to articles that make clear promises for what we will get out of them, as well as those that …

One of the best longreads re: the future of news media I've read in a while: "Websites... have been able to accumulate enormous audiences with incredible speed by harvesting referrals from social networks... Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences, rather than temporarily diverted members of a platform’s audience.…

"How the Islamic State is leaving tech companies torn between free speech and security is a labyrinthine topic... Today’s 8,000-word-plus story on the subject, part of The Washington Post’s “Confronting the Caliphate” series, comes with the background knowledge and context right in the story itself... Knowledge Map, appears as highlighted links…

Cards are bite-sized, self-contained, interactive units of graphical real estate presented within digital apps... cards are mostly used within apps to present information and provide interactive functions ... Things get a lot more fun, however, once cards can be shared between different apps.... The Guardian provides cards on Google Now ... [wh…

"... infographics are often taken at face value... And it is hard to fact check infographics... Fast Company republished 10 facts from Buffer. Fact checking one of the facts in that list went like this: The fact quoted an infographic -> that quoted a blog post at Huffington Post -> which in turn quoted another infographic -> which quoted a blog…

"The story of podcasts suddenly being “back” strongly suggests, and mostly requires, that they had been big at one time and had since gone away. That New York Magazine article even cites a “bottom” time: 2010. But that never really happened." - Why podcasts are suddenly “back” – Marco.org

"Facebook is ... aiming to be the Internet equivalent of a broadband provider — providing the means by which all media is published and accessed. Here’s what brands and publishers need to know ... - Facebook urging publishers to post their articles and videos directly to Facebook... - For publishers that use Facebook for their comments sections,…

"the Internet has dismantled newspaper’s geographic monopoly & business model ... & also upended the core assumptions underlying the actual journalism ... BuzzFeed as an organization has been figuring out what works online for over eight years now, and while “The Dress” may have been unusual in its scale, its existence was no accident... BuzzFee…

A typically good piece of data journalism from Guardian's Datablog: "The number of people employed on zero-hours contracts reached 697,000 in the fourth quarter of 2014. See the characteristics of people employed on zero-hours contracts in four charts " - Zero-hours contracts in four charts | News | The Guardian

Good case study, concluding with observations on the role of journalists which also apply to government communicators: "An engaged journalist's role in the 21st century is not only to inform but to bring readers directly into the conversation through... real-time coverage, alternative story forms, crowdsourcing, beat blogging, user-generated co…

"While we've always loved a good chart and map at Vox, appreciating a chart or map does not data journalism make. Data journalism is not just data visualization... ... the explosion in data sources readily available on the web... can both aid in telling important and necessary stories, but can also be easily misunderstood and potentially manipula…

Good overview of Circa's approach: "A new model for online journalism is emerging, focusing on the atomization of news stories into “bite-sized chunks” of information aimed at mobile audiences."

"many brands even ignore the importance of curation in their streams and instead continually talk about themselves.... Content Curation is the act of discovering, aggregating and posting online content that was produced by others... typically focused on a specific topic or small number of topics that are considered relevant to the audience you’re…

"Since Taylor launched an earlier version of the site at The Boston Globe in 2007, In Focus has known for longform photo storytelling, featuring huge, high-quality images.... If you’re pandering to social media, if you’re going for clickbait, it cuts away at any sort of storytelling." - Q&A: How Alan Taylor, online photography pioneer, is rethin…

"Our hope with adaptive content is to tailor content to a customer’s experience, behavior, and desires... a culmination of ... experience maps, storyboarding, empathy maps — and what we’ve been saying for so long about creating an experience... ... we all believe that our experiences should be more interactive. Why? Smartphones." - 16 Stats That…

"... Both outlets are trying... to crack the task of making a viable online outlet for in-depth, narrative journalism of several thousand words, paid for by readers. They are the most recent, but far from the only, entrants into an overcrowded genre." Good overview of the intense innovation and first failures in the oversaturated longform marketp…

How much more could Google News be? See "... a presentation that a German designer came up with that involved a wholesale redesign and re-thinking of what Google News is and does." Lots of good stuff here. Particularly like how 'smart personalisation' is used to help penetrate the filter bubble: "automatically suggest related stories on a news t…

(FT paywall) "Serial’s success is the most visible example of a renaissance in podcasting – a format that has been around for a decade but which has received a recent surge of interest from consumers, investors and advertisers." Massively underused medium for EU comms, IMHO. - Podcasting poised to go from niche to mainstream - FT.com

"Politico has redesigned its website for the first time in its seven year history, and The Guardian's U.S. recent refresh marks the first time it's redesigned almost entirely in public, with its readers' input. Here's a look at the thinking behind the redesigns, and what the publishers were able to pull off." - Politico, HBR, The Guardian: W…

"The latest trend in storytelling is not driven by super-innovative technology. It requires no expensive accessories and is accessible to all ages and backgrounds. It’s called LISTENING." Gotta love an article which starts like that! Apart from the practical guidelines promised, I liked its observation "about the temporal nature of sound - unable…

"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…

"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…

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…

"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

"... envisions a Yahoo that’s as ubiquitous as computers seem destined to be. Phones, watches, public terminals, brain implants — Yahoo wants to be able to deliver content to all of them... Yahoo Labs’ biggest focus appears to be on machine learning... a dedicated machine learning group based in New York; ... “hardcore science and some theory,…

Awesome takedown of native advertising. Via AdAge.

"There has been a lot of discussion lately about long-form content and how it is changing the content marketing playbook.... Is long-form content really worth the extra effort? It seems that way. SERPIQ recently completed an analysis of the top 10 search results for more than 20,000 keywords and revealed a surprising pattern. The length of cont…