Overview: Content Strategy

she and her team record real audio and motion capture data, then work it into a digital recreation of an event. It's an unusual technique that lets people not just see an event, but explore it.

News is a product... our news products must be good and targeted to succeed. They must know who their users are, what they need, how they need it, and deliver a satisfying experience. That is what a product manager does... thinking about what users ... need from the whole of that product; what their experience of it is like; how it could be more c…

The main Topics this time are language technology, mobile innovation and EU communications, with a few extras to catch-up since the last edition.

To understand what makes BuzzFeed tick, you need to know how Dao Nguyen thinks about data... As the value of content approaches zero, "Having technology, data science, and being able to know how to manage, optimize and coordinate your publishing is the thing that gives you a competitive advantage"... One myth is data scientists are telling report…

sometimes people post disagreeable or disturbing content that does not violate Facebook's policies. This paper explores the potential of community-driven counter-speech to play a critical role in challenging and diminishing these type of posts on social media. Counter-speech is a common, crowd-sourced response to extremism or hateful content... F…

the press help shed sunlight on the inner workings of government, expose flaws and problems in our system, and inform the citizenry, making journalism a cornerstone of a healthy democracy... explanatory journalism... is particularly worthy of attention for its role in improving public knowledge and contributing to a more informed populace.The vide…

I've been invited to prepare a "Technology Buyer Challenge" on Hashtag Platform for the Language Technology Industry Summit this May. (Update, 31/3/16: this project was covered, among many other things, in an interview with professional EU interpreter Alexander Drechsel in his podcast Demos ex machina? Multilingual communication wit…

Democrats and Republicans sometimes seem to be living in two different Americas. We analyzed the past seven debates on each side to show which topics are most discussed within each party (nice, simple data visualisation here)

What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes a lot of sense. What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization.... All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time... Frazzled, exhausted, and …

if he tried to make ads that were beautiful and perfect, it wouldn’t work and his fans would know... his work routinely pulls in millions of views because he’s transparent with his audience... mostly teenage boys know when they’re being peddled a product.

Newswhip data suggests that Facebook’s live videos, which by their very nature are longer and encourage users to comment, drive higher engagement than traditional short Facebook videos. Facebook even recommends that live streams go for at least 5 minutes, if not longer. Both Fusion and Vox.com are aiming to do future live streams in the 20-minute …

Great explainer video - accompanying article here.

the Digiday explainer for explanatory journalism... An article about the latest incremental development in [any] situation may be inscrutable to readers who haven’t been following ... Explanatory journalism aims to demystify those complex topics by providing that context.

We still write stories for the web as if they were fixed and transitory, but they’re not... people have expected that something like 70 per cent of traffic would be to “new” content, and the rest to the “archive”. The reality usually proves to be exactly the other way around... we’re over-weight in publishing “news” and significantly under-weight …

Why are explainers suddenly so popular?... Explainers should create “a scaffold of understanding that future reports can attach to”... a counterpart to the endless streams of headlines, posts and tweets that are how most digital natives find their news today.

if news content focuses on the ‘Who, What, When, and Where,’ explainer journalism looks to inform the reader of the ‘How and Why’... give the reader background information about a story to ensure that they are able to properly understand events as they unfold... Explainer journalism enables the media provider to at least show some intelligence an…

... using Viber and WhatsApp to publish documentaries... Whereas Viber can only be used to send messages to users, the upside of WhatsApp is that it allows for back-and-forth communication. The downside to the platform is that the process is more manual for the publisher. WhatsApp only lets publishers have 256 people per broadcast channel... the …

The institutional brand building you create by having your journalists be great on social platforms cannot be underestimated. Part of having your journalists on these platforms is giving them the freedom to be a normal human being, not a robot, a PR machine or a slave to the wire.

Enter the new editors of the Internet: giant, centralized tech companies that have created platforms... notably Facebook and Apple — want to be the newsstands of tomorrow: the place we go, inside their own ecosystems, to get our news and information... journalism organizations feel they have no alternative but to be part of those ecosystems. This …

It’s tempting to merely argue that the recent crop of newsletters are what came to replace the independent blogosphere of the mid-aughts.... take a look at the subject lines for several of the newsletters ... Any web editor who plugged these as headlines into a CMS would be summarily fired... why are readers responding so well when they fly in th…

My sadly underwhelmed response to @sidewireinc’s gr8 “Today’s Internet is Optimized for Noise”

What’s the difference between customization and personalization? - Customization: The visitor deliberately chooses between options designed to make the user experience more personal.- Personalization: The visitor is automatically shown personalized pages based on anticipated needs / wants.

Axel Springer, wary of being overly dependent on third-party platforms for traffic... fighting back by launching its own news aggregator platform... now has around 1,200 publishers on board ... Digiday spoke with Würtenberger, CEO of Upday, about using humans and algorithms for news sourcing, creating a platform for publishers and banning ad block…

Conversational UIs will also force designers to cosy up to writers, or to become more linguistically literate themselves. Information architects will be trendy again, since syntax and labels are totally their turf.

From Kickstarter’s April 2009 launch through the end of the year, 17 journalism projects received funding. That number more than tripled just a year later ... 168 funded projects in 2014 and 173 in the first nine months of 2015... from $49,256 in 2009 and $263,352 in 2010 to $1,743,668 in the first nine months of 2015... number of people contribu…

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…

What if we viewed investigative reporting more broadly ... used our skills (and the financial resources of many investigative teams) to bring people together to solve problems?... The Tribune didn’t just report on what scientists were doing. We came to them with an ambitious idea, connected them to other top researchers and then became an impor…

"We put aside existing notions about news apps and imagined what our journalism would be if it lived natively on your iPhone. It wouldn’t be a facsimile of our website. It would be something entirely different, with original writing, new features, and a fresh interface."... The Quartz news app isn't for everybody ... the app is by design unlikely…

... manually curate 10 stories from other publishers, which will run as a daily edition. Three different articles, often with opposing viewpoints, will run on each story, representing the left, neutral and right-wing political perspectives on the same story... For example, in Wednesday’s edition, it ran a Guardian story entitled “Terrorism publ…

But it's possible to build tools designed to connect real experts in government, business and the media in a way that generates valuable insight for the rest of us. From our own experience developing Sidewire, a social communications platform, we know there is an appetite for expert political analysis and insight that helps sort fact from fiction …