Overview: Content Strategy

Scientists often speak of the “general public” as a group that is far removed from the academic circles that they belong to.... Scientists have “othered” the general public... there is no such thing ... except for in very specific contexts (i.e. vaccine developers are not the general public vs those who do not develop vaccines when one is speaking…

Yet another variation on the Top3ics format: exploring three facets of one topic, highlighting one outstanding resource (plus a few extra links) for each.  Today’s theme... psychology

Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases ... is a bit of a tangled mess... groups 175 biases into vague categories (decision-making biases, social biases, memory errors, etc) that don’t really feel mutually exclusive to me, and then lists them alphabetically... a simpler, clearer organizing structure to hang these biases off of... biases help us addr…

still ... publishing "dutiful, incremental pieces," ... designed to fill a daily print edition... dominated by long strings of text... a series of goals for areas including visual journalism, reader engagement, newsroom training and diversity... new content management system... build stories with visual elements and examine what the final produ…

Leadership is the art of inspiring others to make a story come true. Therefore, if you’re leading people, you’re telling them a story ... great storytellers ... are going to recruit better... darlings in the press... raise money more easily ... close amazing business developer partnerships... have a strong and cohesive corporate culture ... core…

Many scientists are asking themselves: What can I do?... the answer from ... 314 Action is: Get elected... most scientists view their work as pure and noble, and politics as a dirty game... since Trump’s victory, “many more scientists are realizing why their voices are needed... Scientists bring a unique perspective in how they ... think about …

Marketplace wants to reach a more diverse audience... to raise the economic intelligence of the country... podcast... to approach explainer journalism ... through a group conversation... Our attempt to get the answer is going to be transparent... audience, can you help me with this?

EU money flows from Brussels into thousands of projects and ideas. Why does nobody notice?... some of the worst storytellers happen to be located in Brussels ... majorities in society and the media believe that the European Union belongs in the dustbin of history... eternal Brussels congresses where elitist Eurocrats engage in nothing but myopic …

incipient technologies appear likely to soon obliterate the line between real and fake... you or I will be able to create fake digital clips as easily as regular people created fake-news stories

Building a good CuratorBot required no coding skills. But a great CuratorBot needs faceted search. Can it be done without programming? - second instalment of Adventures of a non-Coder in the World of Chatbots…

To some liberals, Donald Trump’s inauguration portends doom... to many conservatives, it’s a crowning moment ... as if each side is living in ... a different reality.... information avoidance... all of us ... ward off any new information that makes us feel bad, obligates us to do something we don’t want to do or challenges our worldview... we’re …

today’s news outlets are all in a no-win situation where they are forced to contribute to the causes of their own demise to survive... well-meaning people try to “fix” the news. But instead, those methods erode trust in all news outlets... You can draw a straight line from the bad incentive structure forced upon news outlets to the unprecedented d…

Publishers are using Facebook’s latest Instant Articles update, which lets publishers post multiple articles within one post, to publish regular editions of must-read content straight to the platform.... akin to receiving a daily email with the day’s top stories, but readers won’t have to leave Facebook to get it... option to subscribe to get aler…

... fears about how changing technology is affecting the quality of information and the state of our democracy. ... heated debate about the role and size of tech platforms and the extent to which their activities should be regulated. Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes over from mobile as the hottest topic in technology...Expect widespread innovati…

A common intuition is that the main goal of science communication is to present facts; once people encounter those facts, they will think and behave accordingly....in reality, just knowing facts doesn’t necessarily guarantee that one’s opinions and behaviors will be consistent with them... Convincing people that scientific evidence has merit and …

For content curators, adding a CuratorBot on Facebook Messenger is a no-brainer. The alpha testing launched in late December was useful, resulting in a whole bunch of tweaks, as described in this post for Chatbot Magazine.

BBC’s Reality Check team will focus on content that is clearly fabricated and attempting to mislead the public into thinking it has been produced by a reputable news organisation... part of the BBC’s attempt to do more “slow news”, using in-depth analysis and expertise in a bid to help the public understand an especially tumultuous period in the …

Storyful released Verify, a free add-on for Google’s Chrome browser that automatically tells users whether its 40 journalists around the globe have vetted the videos they’re watching... browser icon lights up green if the video is in Storyful’s vetted archive, or red if it isn’t... index is fed largely by automated bots ... Verify incorporates its…

European countries... still behind the U.S. in terms of sheer volume of fake-news ... But posts designed to be entirely false and deliberately trick people is growing. In the U.K.... “It’s rare that a complete falsehood goes viral ... stories written by hyper-partisan sites, that have a kernel of truth and then are expanded into lies lathered with…

Back in 2004, I was one of about thirty people to become the first bloggers ever to get a press pass to a major party’s convention... we were the story. We were followed around by mainstream media, and at any given moment, at least a few of us were giving interviews on radio or TV... it was a great honor to be in the room for Obama’s breakthrough …

German Interior Ministry proposed creating a Center of Defense Against Misinformation, to help hunt down and eradicate fake news or other false information... Czech Republic... plans to open a fake news center .... strategy to force Facebook to delete suspicious or fake news could backfire... 'the story Facebook didn't want you to read' could beco…

In addition to ... income inequality and the shrinking middle class, these 10 infographics... also explain our energy, financial, and shipping systems, the global population boom, our diets, and when your job will be taken by a robot. Couple those with a series of maps that will reframe how you think about geopolitics and you have the start of an …

Find influencers, and partner with them to create Youtility content that helps people make better decisions about their home, auto, boat, motorcycle, etc. But at the operational level, this kind of program creates a number of questions, starting with, “What influencers do we want to work with, and why?”

Freedom of speech, and of the press... also brings responsibility. The Editors’ Code of Practice... requires the “highest professional standards”... IPSO’s overall message is that ocean acidification is just a matter of opinion – not a hard-won, testable understanding ... Why support any research if 250 peer-reviewed papers ... can all be summaril…

thousands of activists have started to push companies to take a stand on ... “hate news” ... Sleeping Giants ... and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys... In the old normal,…

Anxious about... propaganda and fake news ... progressives are calling for an increased commitment to media literacy ... Others ... focus on expert fact-checking and labeling.  ... fail to take into consideration the cultural context ... Understanding what sources to trust is a basic tenet of media literacy education... underlying assumption ... N…

German media and politicians have warned against an election-year spike in fake news after the rightwing website Breitbart claimed a mob chanting “Allahu Akbar” had set fire to a church in the city of Dortmund on New Year’s Eve... local newspaper said Breitbart had combined and exaggerated unconnected incidents to create a picture of chaos and of…

A commonplace book is a central resource or depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information you come across during your life and didactic pursuits. The purpose of the book is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life, in your business, in your writing, speaking or whatever it is that you do.

the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet... doesn’t serve people... it’s not designed to... “content” we all consume on a daily basis is paid for — directly or indirectly — by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. As a result…

Where things get interesting is to consider the deep cognitive mechanisms that shape the emergence of truth networks where a coherent shared set of understandings, assumptions, and beliefs are in play.