Overview: Content Strategy

"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 point of any headline is to draw readers into a story. Rather, what makes clickbait clickbait is the letdown you feel when the story doesn’t deliver on the headline’s promise.... these cynical ploys are partly a product of an online-media business model that revolves around page-views and banner ads.... BuzzFeed and Vice are in the vanguard…

"Al Jazeera English ... has developed from a TV channel to a media organisation with a multiplatform offering ranging from written news to interactives.... the outlet uses interactives as a way to offer its audience a fuller picture.... we complement the coverage on all the other platforms and the coverage on TV... Telling stories built with peop…

"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…

"blogging is so hyped as a panacea, you'd think that simply adding a blog to your site would also help you find the perfect spouse, cure the common cold, and even turn lead into gold. ... you should always question anything that's touted as the right answer for everyone (and everything). So should you blog?... let's look at a few examples of w…

"recent scientific work is putting a much finer point on just how stories change our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors... to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first ... develop tension during the narrative... it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it and continue mimicking t…

"By submitting your content and your keyword through nTopic we determine statistically how relevant your content is to the keyword and make recommendations on how to improve it. Getting your nTopic score is completely free, but you must upgrade to get access to keyword recommendations. "

"Search engines, especially Google, have gotten remarkably good at understanding searchers' intent—what we mean to search for, even if that's not exactly what we search for. How in the world do they do this? It's incredibly complex, but in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the basics—what we all need to know about how entities are connected i…

"Through applying semantic markup to our site, we've embedded an incredibly rich layer of meaningful data in our code.... but don't let the search engines have all the fun; we can use that data, too. By looking at the semantic markup on any given page, we can see what type of "entity" we're looking at ... and its attributes or properties. If we c…

"this is a slippery slope at best: once you have made the decision to alter the flow ... based on abstract criteria programmed into an algorithm, then at some point you are going to decide ... to hide or remove certain things ... to improve the signal-to-noise ratio ... The whole point of having a social network in the first place is that the peo…

"One of the standout features of the recent resurgence of email newsletters from news outlets has been a focus on providing an aggregated experience that encompasses what other publications produce.... the idea is to pick the best and most relevant content, whether it comes from their own stable or someone else's... by producing the highest qual…

"a lot of great content was getting lost in the shuffle, because there weren't enough discovery tools... when a user pulls up the topic picker, each choice reveals other sub-topics that might be of interest. Flipboard used to offer 30 topics, but now it offers a total of 34,000 ... it's deep topic analysis - we use it to surface what other p…

" the basic news story was invented in a different time –when story telling was limited by platform — and it has inherent limitations that you can overcome when trying to tell stories digitally." Don't just assume that what you should be doing is creating 'articles'. Some really useful tricks to free your mind when developing a content strategy h…

"Swarmize enables journalists to tell new, collaborative stories by making use of real-time data collection and visualisation" Just the tests they've already done are awesome. The code's on GitHub. Think to use in surveys, real-time social media monitoring, live blogs ... anything where real-time is useful and/or you might want a second bite at t…

"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…

"Facebook say that the more time users spend at its site, the more likely there will be a robust exchange of diverse viewpoints and ideas shared online. Others fear that users will create their own echo chambers, and filter out coverage they do not agree with. ... [that] “is when you get conspiracy theories.” - How Facebook Is Changing the Way It…

"It's also possible to see Rooms, Ello, and Tilde.club as a rebuke of the new internet _ a place dominated by designed-by-committee apps that raise millions before the first users even sign up, where interactions are either real and largely mundane (Facebook, Instagram, most of Twitter), or shadowy and toxic (Yik Yak, Reddit, 4chan). These new exp…

"The time had come for The Big Departmental Website Redesign, and my content strategist heart was all aflutter." - The Specialized Web: Working with Subject-Matter Experts · An A List Apart Article

"The news media sector has become heavily dependent on traffic from Facebook and Google. A reliance now dangerously close to addiction. Maybe it’s time to refocus on direct access... Which company in the world wouldn’t be seen as fragile when depending so much on a small set of uncontrollable distributors? for a news, value-added type media, the…

"There are three simple cardinal rules of being an ethical aggregator:" ... and because I'm following them, please click on the link below to discover what they are. - We're all aggregators now : Columbia Journalism Review

"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…

Th@e new Guardian Visuals team will bring together ... the graphics desk, picture desk, interactive team and parts of the digital design and multimedia teams... it's hard to assemble teams that are cross-disciplinary ... and have the right combination of designers, developers, graphic artists, photographers." - Guardian forms new editorial teams…

Interesting bet on curation: "“Watching” ... aggregates breaking news updates from the Times and across the web 24 hours a day... a cross between a constantly updating wire feed and an in-house Twitter stream of stories Times staffers are keeping an eye on... a carefully filtered window into rest of the world of news, all with the NYT stamp of ap…

"A newsroom typically contains reporters, editors, data journalists, developers, designers … But traditionally they work in separate departments, unable to seamlessly collaborate together. That’s why silos don’t work. Instead, there should be a horizontal of these newsroom archetypes to truly integrate the journalism with the tech." - J-teams, le…

"Semantic technology solves a concrete problem: sorting through large collections of unstructured data. With unstructured data expected to account for over 80 percent of all data within the next five years, the ability to target this data using semantic technology opens doors to better understand context and intent in search, and ultimately achiev…

"Collaboration on the web has always been a challenge. Beyond the typically one-dimensional CMS, other familiar tools such as Google Docs and Dropbox also fall short because they either lack multimedia support (Docs) or don’t offer a true version control system (Dropbox). Over the past year-and-a-half, however, a host of potential collaboration s…

"journalists should see Vine as a resource for more social storytelling,... A key step for producing a good Vine is to think "video first", and build the story around the element that you want to visualise... "A good Vine is one that you want to keep watching ... It's not a story, it's not a tweet, it's a little tiny loop that should look good." …

"So if you too are just starting out with scraping, here are five of the most useful tools I’ve encountered while learning and working on my project." - Five data scraping tools for would-be data journalists | Knight Lab | Northwestern University

"These APIs will usually take text in the form of a file or URL, and ... identifies the topic of the text you submit, and/or finds “named entities” in the text.... include people, places, organizations, nations... Given that there are several APIs that offer similar services, how can we (and you) choose between them?" - Semantic APIs, what to co…

"L'explosion du numérique et du transmédia a permis aux créateurs de développer leur univers et leur storytelling sur un grand nombre de supports. " - Comprendre le transmédia en 5 points | InaGlobal