Overview: Business

Great piece on the implications for creators of the shift to algorithmically managed content platforms."Vine was an entirely new cultural platform ... Twitter had unwittingly enabled the creation of a true subculture... [but] didn’t know how to make money from it... in contrast... TikTok has prospered because it generally seems to understa…

Today's social platforms' business models are not inevitable, but because we see them as such we constrain "the solution space we consider for combatting mis-/disinformation, polarization, and promotion of extremism... we need to consider what technologies [and] digital media to have a productive role in democratic societies".H…

make every minute you spend consuming information much, much more valuable... much ... online content ... awful. Driven by clickbait, optimized for maximum distraction... lowest common denominator, it only added to people’s confusion ... in ... productivity, performance, and personal effectiveness... lots of gems ... buried beneath an avalanche of…

policy options ... to create a more enabling environment for independent professional journalism... demonstrate what democratic digital media policy could look like... protect ... from threats to their independence and to freedom of expression... level playing field and support... oriented towards the digital, mobile, and platformdominated future …

In all the urgent debate about regulating, investigating, and even breaking up internet companies, we have lost sight of the problem we are trying to confront: not technology but instead human behaviour on it... in their search for someone to blame, government outsource fault and responsibility, egged on by media (whose schadenfreude constitutes …

If using a beautiful content management system doesn’t miraculously solve a media company’s cash flow problems, what will? If short videos, or elaborate commenting systems, or mobile storytelling, or interactive graphics, or Snapchat Stories, or Instagram hashtags, or Instant Articles, or Google AMP, or programmatic advertising, or native advertis…

The privations of the past decade and a half have unleashed nothing if not a stream of flimsy would-be innovations... as a public service, we offer this starter list of Media-Innovation-Don’ts.

Business coaching to a media startupOne of the smallest, yet sweetest, projects of 2016 was helping specialist online media Borderlexrethink its business and relaunch its website. Coaching ranged from overall business model right down to the nuts and bolts of social media promotion, engagement and monitoring.

Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. ... very like being in the Matrix but with less kung fu and more Polly Toynbee and Nigel Farage... here are a few of the things I’ve learned…

A financial incentive and a paid coordinator were essential to the success of the project. The intangible that made the project really work, however, was the willingness on the part of Media Consortium members to work with each other... not have been possible without a trust-based network in place... At the beginning of the project, outlets asked…

This paper will explore and critique the logic and motivations behind the position that these content providers/aggregators are technology companies rather than media companies, as well as the communications policy implications associated with accepting or rejecting this position... The final section discusses why it is important that these online…

Times’ Maker Week — a weeklong initiative for the paper’s developers, designers, product managers, and other newsroom staffers to take a break from their typical work and focus on other projects... the Times holds quarterly Maker Days where staffers can spend a day doing research or pursuing another type of learning opportunity that they may not …

How can project management help news outlets improve their workflow and manage their time and resources better?... the role of a product manager or developer will sometimes overlap with that of a project manager, Katharine Bailey, the outlet's head of news products, told Journalism.co.uk in a recent podcast.

the Post is employing a concept called “laddering,” converting unique visitors into paying customers by getting them to increase social engagement with its website.

Every business, at some point, faces competition. But competition is not the same as disruptive competition — a new class of competitors created when technology enables new players to compete with incumbents on terms the incumbent isn’t used to... it’s all the digital forces that have faced the newspaper business — from blogs to aggregators to soc…

This is a completely new way to launch a media startup,... Most startups start with VC funding or a foundation grant or corporate support and then go chasing after an audience. But our crowdfunding approach means that #EmergingUS will be built on an audience of thousands... treated as real stakeholders. They'll play a big role in shaping the cont…

Betts ... became the first data head to join the publisher’s board, recognizing data’s importance in growing its subscriptions and audience. Today, he heads up a 30-person team focused on customer analytics and research. Here are lessons from Betts on data maturity and driving audience engagement... While subscriptions are critical ... it’s not t…

Publishers are placing big bets on social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, praying that fishing for audiences outside their owned sites will eventually pay off in new readers and advertising... it’s still a gamble... payoff in audience and ad dollars is uncertain. Plus, fishing expeditions are hardly free. Hiring more staff is just part of t…

“Innovation is not just a cool thing. It’s not just a process. It’s a culture. We research. We design. We build.” Innovation should not compete with the daily grind of the company, it must emerge from it

Platforms are eating publishers... The idea that Facebook and its ilk could act as information gatekeepers is also a bleak prospect... Facebook wouldn’t allow The New Republic to create an ad for an innocuous piece on medical marijuana ... If Facebook is squeamish about medical marijuana now, imagine the state of the fourth estate once controversy…

Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton was an extreme skeptic of publishers relying too heavily on Facebook. Now he's ... “all in” on publishing directly to Facebook with its Instant Articles program, a backtracking on Denton’s well-publicized lament that publishers are too reliant on platforms...Facebook, with its deep pool of accurate user data, can help …

BuzzFeed has mastered the art of distributed publishing... 5 billion views per month ... across 30 platforms, from Facebook to Pinterest to Snapchat. In a month it does 3 billion video views, less than 5 percent of which are on BuzzFeed.com.... But BuzzFeed must navigate a thorny transition... What’s the ROI of (brand) cat videos? Marketers al…

For the US daily newspaper sector over the past decade, weekday circulation has fallen 17 percent and ad revenue more than 50 percent ... a key for the industry is changing the culture of newsrooms to foster innovation. This includes allowing interaction of different groups—journalists, technicians and others which the study referred to as "tribes…

What are Europe's most innovative news applications and initiatives?

We sift through the academic journals so you don’t have to. Here are 10 of the most interesting studies about social and digital media published in 2015.

The innovation we talk of in journalism isn’t the kind of innovation designed to radically change the way consumers behave, it’s really just short term reactionary attempts to try and deliver content to platforms the majority of consumers already use... Innovation in tech is rarely if ever short term... We’re being taken on this journey and it …

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…

What does the rise of digital distributors mean for the Open Web?... is there a point at which distributors create enough value for publishers to stop having their own websites? If distributors are capturing market share because of a superior user experience, is there a future technology that could disrupt them? And the ultimate question: who will…

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.…

"product management in media is the intersection between journalism, user experience, software, data and analytics" Just replace 'media' with government and you've got a manifesto for participative government right there. - The Need For Product Management In Media — Medium