Overview: Content Strategy

Looks like one kind of newspaper has a long future - the worst kind: "Supermarket tabloids have long been an icon of unreliability, largely because of their outrageous claims and sensational, melodramatic design. But when individual pieces are shared via social media, these visual and context clues are typically stripped out... Without this conte…

Is data journalism just another opportunity to bamboozle an audience? Surely publishing the data in interrogable form would be the answer? "data give commentary a false sense of authority since data analysis is inherently prone to bias. The author’s priors, what he believes or wants to be true before looking at the data, often taint results that …

A pretty good idea of where news & journalism will be in 5 years, or deja vu all over again? "the organizations worth backing must be run by tech savvy, top-notch people focused on social distribution of stories that serve an existing but underserved niche audience. ... “They are all technology companies first ... understand how people utilize t…

"when you figure something out that's not trivial ... you're wasting it on Twitter or Facebook. ... The mission of blogging is to empower all of us to go directly to each other with our expertise. So if you know something as well as anyone else, or you learn something or know something that should be shared, then you should share it on your blog. …

When the keyboard loses its connection every few minutes, the screen flips upside down and you can’t enter anything into online form. Eventually they refunded me... after seeing this video.

"“In the old days, the few big newspapers were so profitable they could run desks on most of the most important issues in the world. Now, as the news landscape fragments, investigative journalism often takes place in nonprofits... " - Upworthy partners with ProPublica and advocacy media groups on original content » Nieman Journalism Lab

@Poynter's piece seems fair. While it's true that "rebundling of news is booming. New aggregation sites with a social media twist, led by BuzzFeed, are working ingenious variations on the first wave like The Huffington Post..." ... and that if everyone in the world had a smart phone and an iPad, the global news market will grow rather than shri…

Applies equally to projects, where for step 1 (quoted below) the focus should be the project's USP: "Define what exactly your company is, its motto and the sole purpose of its existence. Write down everything that you think your company/website is about. Is it about marketing tips, social media, mobile apps, etc.? Define the existence of your com…

Well, plus ca change - absolutely none of the things some BloggingPortal editors said we'd do after our meeting in January have been done, apart from our own posts and what Stefan did, which is ironic given that he told us he had no time to do anything.

"a new model for digital-first audio programming ... a collective, helping to market one another, providing guidance on technical issues, and sharing lessons on growing audiences. Radiotopia will provide the framework for raising money..." - Welcome to Radiotopia, a podcast network with the aesthetics of story-driven public radio » Nieman Journal…

FalseA German journalist and camera crew have fun with the EP gravy train in “Scandale au Parlement Européen : Argent facile, champagne à gogo et autres privilèges. This sort of film iseasy to make and so becoming commonplace. And people in the Brussels Bubble wonder why they are not so widely loved elsewhere?

"some of the BBC’s most experienced investigative reporters explain how they find and tell their stories." Access to the BBC Academy's College of Journalism website is free to everyone in the UK and commercially available overseas

Interesting perspective on the rash of new tech-content hybrids emerging in the media space. Back in the day, companies could be either tech or content, but not both: "What were you going to be really good at? Engineering or “content”? You couldn’t do both, because that would mean that one would be subordinate to the other. And if you were going…

"We don’t write articles. We tell stories and those stories persist over time... Each story is comprised of fragments ... stitched together to create a story. In many ways circa represents the next step in the atomization of news ... allows people to read stories and identify new developments faster ... and makes it possible to dig deeper by lin…

"The way we evolved ... is really not the way we have to operate today ... this attempt at hyperproductivity is making us much less productive.'" A podcast worth every minute. I have a few of these techniques down pat, most days, as long as I can work from home, but the whole mindfulness thing is still over my horizon. - 4 Ways to Make Your …

worth repeating for everyone who thinks that the path to democracy in the EU is measured in column inches...

"“Fished out of the shadows, old news coverage in China’s media can provide clues to the family connections of government officials as reporters investigate their financial dealings.”"

Oh dear. "Andreessen mentions the “Chinese wall” that many media entities maintain between the business side and the editorial side. This approach is flawed, he says: “No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off the hook on how the business works.” Many businesses, Andreessen argues, manage to balance incentives and conflicts and ca…

Original linkTonight I'll be toddling along to Grilling Kippers, a UKIP-focused anti-Eurosceptic campaign from deep within the Brussels Bubble.

Les Echos looks to be doing what I have long dreamed to do for the bloggingportal reboot - deploy semantic analysis to aid content discovery and to underpin a new wave of media and comment. But do we have to call it an 'aggrefilter'? "Les Echos launches its business news aggrefilter ... to gain critical working knowledge of the semantic web." …

“The best explainers are direct, concise and easy to understand. But investigative journalism is rarely any of those things, instead reflecting the messiness of real life… explanation is just the beginning, a gateway into the deep-dive…”

Damn, some of these ideas I implemented 12 years ago for the EC's thematic architecture. Nice to see them in a different context: First, the problem with current news journalism: "The column inches devoted to the new are column inches not given to the important... this stress on novelty is a holdover from when the cost of making and moving paper …

A Storify on 8 possible business models for journalism from Marc Andreessen (Cofounder of Netscape, now VC at a16z). Highlights: (6): "We already see the rise of new kinds of aggregators in the wake of the great unbundling of newspapers & magazines. Signal-to-Noise: "quality can easily coexist with crap. All can thrive in respective markets.... …

Sobering reality check on new journalism ventures which: "...from a business perspective, hardly be worth commenting on, except for the fact that the people doing the commenting — other journalists — believe that perhaps, in a declining profession, this could be a new life. It's journalism-centricity to a particular myopic degree.. an extreme exa…

Beautiful visual online communication example from NYTimes.com - Extra Virgin Suicide

US authorities seem particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias. Anyone remember http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B ? "FBI was already convinced they had their man, so they rationalized away the non-matching elements ... Mayfield being jailed without charge; his home and office burgled by the FBI; his client-attorney privilege violated; his lif…

"On SlideShare you can upload your presentation and if it gets popular, it can be viewed by millions of people. If you know how to make the presentation, you can not only get traffic to your site, but you can also improve your rankings with Google, expand your followship on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc., attract more s…

Good intro to the maths of virality, and why Upworthy's best friend will kill them eventually: " As a result, there’s a direct feedback loop between C and FBT [Facebook Throttle - the % of friends who will see a user's FB share]: the higher your clickbaitiness (C), the less that Facebook will throttle you, and the more likely that your articles w…

"All of these things are using human powered context to organize and curate content in a better way. This is the rise of editors. It used to be bloggers and now it's organizing all of the activity with proper editors and direction... "

One for for the Bloggingportal reboot toolbox: "Newspaper is an amazing python library for extracting & curating articles ... delivers Instapaper style article extraction.” - Newspaper: Article scraping & curation — newspaper 0.0.2 documentation