Overview: Content Strategy

"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

"When is a print advertorial a native ad? The Washington Post published an ad for Shell in Thursday’s print edition that it’s touting as its first native ad in print. Shell used the ad, which ran on A13, to tell readers about the work it’s doing to improve energy efficiency. A nearly identical version ran online." - The Washington Post takes its …

"Following on the heels of the Guardian and Metro UK, News UK has developed a Creative Content Unit to focus on native advertising... We've entered a new world where lines are fuzzier. The ethics shouldn't be fuzzy... If you're straight up and disclose who you are and where you're coming from, readers are mature enough to determine whether it's s…

If you care about EU democracy you need to care about European media, particularly as the upcoming US media invasion gets underway. They'll be pushing on an open door when they get to Brussels.

"“The best way to preserve editorially independent, high quality journalism is to preserve the business model. And I think the idea of branded content that shares a form factor with editorial is a great first step.”" - Going native at the Times | Capital New York

The last is the best: "14... One sure way to trigger writer's block when blogging is to think, "I have to capture all my thoughts on this idea and write it about it definitively once and for all."" I definitely fell into that trap, and also definitely found that I could: "... work around the edges of an idea over days and weeks and months and re…

The seminal launch 538 launch post: "... while the first two steps of the process (collecting and organizing information in the form of news stories) are thought to fall within the province of “objective” journalism, explanatory journalism is sometimes placed in the category of “opinion journalism.” ... [which] doesn’t seem to abide by the standa…

A useful look at how user-centricity has leapt out of the web department and into the business strategy: "... Quartz ... Gawker, BuzzFeed and Tumblr... are increasingly thinking about what they do as providing a service, not just as a business that generates content and then delivers it to people.... you have to experiment, and iterate rapidly, …

"Today, we have seen the proliferation of new news ventures thanks to some fortuitous changes in the funding environment, such as venture capitalists, tech philanthropists, and big companies willing to take a chance on actual content produced by journalists as opposed to funding platforms or aggregators. And they all have mission statements speaki…