Overview: Content Strategy

Brown Moses made his name crowdsourcing information in conflict zones, such as analysing weapons in Syria ... from his front room in Leicester, England... using social media, open source tools, and public information to verify details that news organizations can miss. Today, he's launching a site to pool his and others knowledge together in one…

"Two of the biggest trends in news today: the rise of mobile and the rise of data visualization. The unfortunate reality is that they’re often in conflict. ... If you want to do better, check out MobileVis ... Ros also pulls out a set of best practices for doing visualizations for mobile. Data visualization is good. Data visualization that works …

"The Post's new online vertical, Storyline, will cover policy topics through articles, videos and charts -- or "chapters" -- that follow a particular storyline.... avoid "hypothetical policy debates" ... We are going to tell stories with people, with characters, with human drama, in a way that other policy sites don't do very often... depar…

"Could “all you need to know” be the most insidious, reductive, and lame story formula currently conquering our reading life? Everywhere you turn there’s another purported ne plus ultra explainer purporting to tell us “absolutely everything we could possibly need to know” about some current event, some curiosity of history, some deep mystery of li…

"Any time something as complex as SEO is painted in such broad strokes – which many blogs do in order to appeal to a larger audience – there are going to be things left out. And unfortunately for many marketers trying to improve their search rankings, they’re often very important things." Good guide. Particularly like: "Your first priority shoul…

"the Orange is the New Black-inspired content series on women inmates in America cracked the top 10 most read articles on the site, with fifty percent of its traffic coming from social media and 60 percent from mobile. ... time spent ... rivaled time spent with the top New York Times editorial. “ - New York Times adman gushes over native advertis…

Apart from 3 good videos to watch, a good example of content curation... "We have all heard (ad nauseam) about the “power of brand storytelling,” and I know that I have read more than one blog that spits off a numeric list of tips that I just “can’t live without” as a content marketer..." - 3 TED Talks That Uncover the Secrets of Storytelling | …

"those that know how to tell the stories of their work are heard (and subsequently funded) while those who are poor at storytelling are often forgotten and neglected" - Quantum Computing And The Value Of Storytelling In Science - ReadWrite - Station Q, Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/stories/stationq/index.html

What does Wierd Al Yankovic have to teach the EU about communications? Watch the video and agree: “Everything, basically”.

How to Spot Liars at Work and How to Deal with Them 45 minutes of psychology, body language, etc. Really insightful into the blind spots we all have, the biases we suffer from which make us distrust honest people with the ‘wrong’ eyebrows or chin, and which make us trust people we shouldn’t on the basis of looks, group membership, vested interest,…

Key "takeaways" (gag), of which the last is hilarious: "- Two-thirds of readers have felt deceived upon realizing that an article or video was sponsored by a brand. - 54 percent of readers don’t trust sponsored content. - 59 percent of readers believe a news site loses credibility if it runs articles sponsored by a brand. - As education level …

"As media companies seek out new ways to make money, is a crisis of trust brewing?"

"I’ve long said that if you have to put a link next to a label saying “what’s this?” then the label clearly isn’t clear enough. ... when I see a link to Forbes on Twitter, I don’t know whether it is going to take me to (1) the good work of a Forbes journalists, (2) the good work of a Forbes contributor, (3) the bad work of one of many Forbes cont…

"When asked to pay for well-reported news content, there’s a growing swell of readers who understand the value and are willing to invest in it. ... We’re seeing a renewed, if still small, consumer commitment to funding journalism ... these models are developing outside the United States... there is relatively little European foundation support…

"Online video is very much here to stay... Even companies such as Vice admit they don't have everything cracked – Vice only launched a news vertical a few months ago after realising its current affairs content was the most popular on YouTube. With that in mind, the three approaches to online video from News UK, Meredith, and Don't Panic may prove…

" News cooperatives have long thrived in Europe ... and Mexico. Yet, with a few exceptions they never really took root in the U.S. That may be changing. " - Kickstarter Bets On Bringing The Slow Europe Model Of Journalism To The U.S. | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

LinkedIn lost my last post, so I expect that this will be my last post there. Apart from announcing that, the post also sets out some of the other problems I’ve discovered with LinkedIn’s attempt to become a blogging platform.I’m not predicting their failure - as my first post pointed out, the concept has huge inbuilt advantages. But any system wh…

"The parliamentary process is indeed so similar to a collaborative software development workflow that it is only natural to try and use a version control tool such as Git to track individual legislative changes." - OpenGov Voices: How GitLaw turns the French parliamentary process into open data - Sunlight Foundation Blog

"blogs are ... just one specific kind of publishing format, with posts that appear in reverse chronological order.... this is a little like saying that a sonnet is just a specific way of ordering text, featuring iambic pentameter and an offset rhyming scheme. Obviously not every blog post is a poem, but there is something inherent in the practice …

"where this style of reporting was once reserved for a newspaper’s resident weird .... [it now] represents a sort of merging between the opinion page and the front page. ... helps keep journalism outlets more accountable for backing up their opinions. No longer can the Wall Street Journal espouse climate denialism from the fact-less safety of the …

As if blogs were just a question of conversational tone and reverse-chronology ... "We’re going to continue to provide bloggy content with a more conversational tone ... We’re just not going to do them as much in standard reverse-chronological blogs.” " - ‘Almost half’ of the NYT’s blogs will close or merge | Poynter.

Fascinating article in Issue 14 (theme: Evolution): "It is a case of convergent evolution—where different species separately developed similar biological adaptations when faced with the same environmental pressures. Salamanders are Wake’s go-to example when asked a decades-old question in evolutionary biology: If you could replay the “tape of lif…

"On Monday, at almost the exact same moment as tens of thousands of people — including dozens of professional journalists — were checking the SCOTUSblog site to see whether new decisions by the country’s top court had been posted, the site itself was being denied a press pass" - Senate press gallery ignores the evolution of journalism, denies SCO…

For those still confused: "Content marketing is not PR as such... But there is a basic realization that people are tired of ads and having promotional messages pushed on them. So called “branded journalism” is ... often compelling high-quality content that many newspaper editors would wish their journalists could produce.... brands seem sometimes …

"1. Expert credibility comes from having knowledge others do not. People want experts they can understand and trust, especially when trying to understand complex or ambiguous topics like new technology, engineering, advanced science, or law... 2. Harness hierarchical credibility 3. Seek referent credibility 4. Take advantage of associative credib…

New data supporting old news: "According to Gallup ... of 18,000 consumers surveyed, 62 percent said social media had no influence on their buying decisions. Among millennials, 48 percent said social media didn't make a difference... Many social media advertisers have ... neglected the essence, and potential, of social media: people talking to …

"In the end, meetings turn out to be a waste of time — just people sitting around, chatting, wasting hours of precious time (even preparing for it). Approximately 15 percent of your time working in any company is spent in meetings. That number is more than doubled for middle managers, while executives spend 50% of their time stuck in meetings."

"steering the storyline between a brand and its consumers must create programs that remember the code, deploy many different types of content at the correct time and inject humanity and purpose into every story..."

Part 2 of my second weekly roundup, where the overriding theme is innovation.

@baekdal explores "a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry ... based on a business model that used to work in the old days of media, but was as a result of scarcity." Newspapers, he argues, are "the supermarket of news ... [but] upermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do... But on the internet, e…