Overview: Content Strategy

science has become as horrifically politicized as any other aspect of American life.... If we truly want to endorse the idea of science, let’s break up into groups and fan out across America:

What distinguishes Pulitzer Prize-winning stories is not only painstaking journalistic work ... but also the use of emotional storytelling... because objectivity tends to be seen as emotionless, emotional storytelling tends to be viewed as anathema to good journalism. The winning stories... show that it’s possible to retain objectivity and also st…

For every man-made crisis event... we found evidence of alternative narratives, often shared by some of the same accounts and connected to some of the same online sites. These rumors had different “signatures” from other types of rumors... rose more slowly, and then they lingered, ebbing and flowing ... sustained participation by a set group of Tw…

the Facebook Pages seeing the biggest average engagements per post across news, interests, politics, and more

The objectivity that matters so much in science is not primarily a characteristic of individual scientists but of scientific communities. Scientists rarely refute their own pet hypotheses... Their fellow scientists will be happy to expose these hypotheses to severe testing... Not being afraid of being wrong... is a value we could promote... Intel…

Fake news is too big and messy to solve with algorithms or editors — because the problem is….us... Racing to implement Band-Aids may feel good, but ... creates a distraction while enabling the underlying issues to flourish... I mostly see “fake news” being deployed by folks as a new frame for pushing long-standing agendas and commitments... coun…

Instagram, Facebook, virtually all news sites… their MO is to keep you on their website for as long as possible... advertisers love  eyeballs.... The scrolling keeps us going... a gravitational force field... takes a lot of energy to escape...premium Medium isn’t an endless feed... It isn’t about keeping us on the website or the app as long as pos…

Facebook today cannot exist without AI. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger... your experiences are being powered by AI... Eventually, this “classifying” step—known as supervised learning—may become automated, as the company pursues an ML holy grail known as “unsupervised learning,” ... Facebook sees the visual cortex merging wit…

vast universe of self-built social media empires devoted to spreading false, misleading, and polarizing science and health news ... Natural News ... are “[o]pening my eyes to the reality that everything about our culture is corrupted and I can’t trust nothing but what I see and experience.”.. people tend to hold beliefs that align with their cultu…

Material that arouses heated emotions within the viewer spreads faster and wider than well-considered, evidence-based argument.For an elected leader, a u-turn is seen as the ultimate betrayal, but for a scientist, changing views in the face of better evidence is a sign of the highest integrity.... Imagine, if you will, a sort of spellchecker appl…

research the critical trends and market conditions that are of importance to their clients and the company. From that commitment content flows at relatively low cost. It’s easy to write when you have compelling research to share, that has already been paid for by the strategic needs of the company.

"conservatives who received a correction telling them that Iraq did not have [Weapons of Mass Destruction] were more likely to believe that Iraq had WMD." ... fact-checking reinforced the mistaken belief... the "backfire effect."A new paper, however, suggests the "backfire effect" may be a very rare phenomenon.... People are extra happy to adopt a…

Regardless of partisan preference, belief in Trump falsehoods fell after these were corrected ... research found no evidence of a "backfire effect," i.e. an increase in inaccurate beliefs post-correction... [but] Trump supporters were just as likely to vote for their candidate after being exposed to his inaccuracies.... "If the original informat…

The websites Liberal Society and Conservative 101 appear to be total opposites... published stories that were almost exactly the same, save for a few notable word changes... These for-the-cause sites that appeal to hardcore partisans are in fact owned by the same Florida company... all it takes to turn a liberal partisan story into a conservative…

the term fake doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of the different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false)... once you start breaking these categories down and mapping them against one another you begin to see distinct patt…

according to ... data, many UKIP voters will change their views on immigration if politicians can reassure them by highlighting the impressive rate of assimilation already taking place in British society... all ethnic groups – including the majority – want their community to have a future... It’s rare for stories such as these to shift people’s a…

There are always “alternative facts.” What matters is how we decide which of those alternative facts are most likely to be true... Conway’s statement based ... on a much older tradition of deciding what is true: the argument from authority.... the culmination of a long retreat from the scientific perspective on truth... pitted against creationist…

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias... a trait that should have been selected against. ... it must have some adaptive function... related to our “hypersociability.” ... Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned wit…

scientists and their supporters need to paint a positive vision of the future, where science re-affirms its moral authority, articulates how it will help us, and advances a noble cause

We know little about the amount of fake news an average citizen consumes, or how it fits into their overall news diet... What we found calls into question the severity of the fake news crisis.... We gathered data for both the real and fake news sites from comScore... First, the fake news audience is tiny compared to the real news audience–about 1…

Several contributors suggested that different media organizations could come together both on a reporting level and on a broader level. There’s the idea for a “‘pooled’ White House new dashboard,” “a new kind of aggregation site for specific topics.”

our current misinformation problem is only the tip of a massive iceberg — and this looming disaster starts with AI...when we see a picture that seems very unlikely, we naturally assume that it is photoshopped... with AI, we are heading toward a world where this will be the case with every form of media: text, voice, video, etc.

an AI system that could generate explanatory, insightful articles... foster “a seamless interaction” between human and machine... Heliograf software identifies the relevant data, matches it with ... the template, merges them, and then publishes different versions across different platforms... alert reporters via Slack of any anomalies it finds in…

Community engagement is about shifting that perspective. It’s about continuously listening, interacting and serving a community. How did the work contribute to the community reaching its goals? Far too often, journalists are obsessed with telling the story. And the story is good. But the story. isn’t. enough. design thinking ... can help us achi…

Price was the first person ever to be diagnosed with what is now known as highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM, a condition she shares with around 60 other known people. She can remember most of the days of her life as clearly as the rest of us remember the recent past

Three articles unpacking the relationship between community, communications, content and EU communications.

pro-active warnings designed to contextualize and pre-expose web users to related but fake information in order to debunk factual distortion in advance... the more detailed warning was about twice as effective as the general warning at shifting opinion towards acceptance of climate science consensus despite exposure to fake news. Warnings were pre…

But millions of people chose to skip the media ... and watch the speech live, via Facebook... greeted with a litany of comments and emoticon reactions, all colored by the point of view of the outlet broadcasting it...a live or real-time filter bubble, where a viewer’s perceptions of a live event are colored by the commentary that surrounds it.

author of The Content Trap and professor at Harvard Business School, talks about the strategic challenges facing digital businesses, and explains how he and his colleagues wrestled with them when designing HBX, the school’s online learning platform... success for the best companies does not come from making the best content, it comes from recogniz…

the most recommended stories on Medium have either to do with startups, life or productivity. Sometimes, all three topics are squeezed in a single story — How to be super productive in your startup and change your life… If we can undo the follower bias, I think everybody becomes a writer and nobody really becomes a celebrity.