Overview: Online Strategy

we built an Interactive News team from scratch... a tight-knit group of editors and newsroom developers ... creates tools and processes ... to disrupt a print-first workflow. Here’s a look at how we got there and what we learned along the way.... A newsroom developer is only a Slack message away...we have three content editors embedded in diffe…

An open app platform will let digital news publishers play with the big guys... Siri was also shown answering basic news and information questions while you watch... imagine uses for breaking news and other journalistic purposes. - Apple announces an app platform for Apple TV, potentially big for news outlets investing in video » Nieman Jour…

One of the best longreads re: the future of news media I've read in a while: "Websites... have been able to accumulate enormous audiences with incredible speed by harvesting referrals from social networks... Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences, rather than temporarily diverted members of a platform’s audience.…

"AOL's online dominance was such that building sites for the traditional web became secondary ... Companies fought over who had the best relationship with AOL, thereby allowing them access to audiences that their competitors didn't have.... If you're starting to think that 1995 AOL sounds a lot like 2015 Facebook, you'd be right. 20 years late…

"the most crucial element of Facebook’s new power: the right to chose between the free expression of ideas or to instead impose censorship when it deems content unworthy... How will its algorithms handle stories posted directly to Facebook that question Facebook’s monopoly status? ... If the Washington Post posted its PRISM story about collusion …

"Skeptics are howling that this is a Faustian bargain—that the media are mortgaging their long-term futures for short-term gain... Facebook has presented the news media with a collective-action problem. News sites aren’t blind.... if they could all get together and decide, as a group, what to do about Facebook, no doubt they’d think long and hard…

"The problem is that Facebook controls what you see and when. If it becomes the primary way to consume news and watch videos, what happens when a news story is controversial about the company itself? Or isn’t within its content guidelines (like pornography)? You’ll be receiving a filtered version of the internet that’s controlled by one company."

"The New York Times is preparing to plant a taproot right inside the highly walled garden that is Facebook." - Memo To Publishers: Watch Where You Put That Taproot… — Medium

"the idea of distributed content argues that publishers should be more comfortable putting their content on platforms they don’t control. But Facebook isn’t just another platform. It’s dominant in a way no other platform is... the sort of decision that one might look back on in a few years as the moment you got swindled" - Facebook wants to be t…

"The Post’s suite of Web apps presents a more specialized alternative to traditional do-it-all content management systems like Drupal... Currently in development at The Post is an application tentatively titled “Storybuilder,” ... including a feature ... to create an index of facts associated with each story. Using this index, Storybuilder could…

"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…

After the standard survey of Facebook's impact on news & democracy, an interesting analysis of the way Facebook's: "trending topics has had a deeply pernicious effect on the way news is produced... encourages publications to look for what's trending and pump out something on that subject as quickly as possible... lots of quickly aggregated p…

"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…

"... a new way of measuring the actual attention of readers, as part of a move to get publishers and advertisers to stop focusing only on clicks and pageviews... Unlike pageviews, which simply measure whether a page has loaded, or even unique visitors ... metrics like “active exposure time,” ... can determine how much time a reader spent with a s…

As I mentioned in my previous post, the past couple of years have seen a lot of innovation in online content strategy, coupled with growing disenchantment with "Big Internet".

Tracking #Ferguson on Twitter. Via @Mathewi, GigaOm

Good example of CMS innovations emerging from newsrooms - wish I'd added to my recent weekly LinkedIn tour: "a multi-faceted piece of newsroom infrastructure, a set of building blocks that will allow organizations to turn on or turn off various engagement features with relative ease ... a bunch of parts that you can assemble and reassemble ... …

"it appears that the FT is adopting a model similar to that of a wire service in its mobile approach, with mobile news being complemented by context, comment, and analysis in the print product, as well as to a certain degree on the web." - “From a news business to a networked business”: The FT pushes its workflows to digital » Nieman Journalism L…

We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views

And not just journalists. New generation news sites are redefining news and, by consequence, rethinking information architecture, content strategy and CMS. I only hope the results filter through to everyone else, and sooner rather than later. "... a moment when young talent began demanding superior technology as the key to producing superior jour…

A new generation of companies, like CIRCA, are redefining the structure of how information is treated, and building new CMS to support it. Their approach will inevitably feed into a new generation of CMS for whom the 'article' and 'page' are, if not meaningless, at least optional. And I for one can't wait. "what we’re really doing at Circa is a…

Great idea for explaining EU affairs or just wishful thinking? "A new game called Fantasy Geopolitics (think Fantasy Football meets Model United Nations) is radically changing the way high school students in Minnesota are interacting with the news." - How a High School Teacher Is 'Gamifying' World News

Seems Zuck's taken Filter Bubble criticisms to heart, combining human & machine curation (now where have I heard that before?) to create what Techcrunch calls “content serendipity” (wish I'd coined that one): "Each Section combines stories chosen by Facebook’s human editors and surfaced by the Paper algorithm [from] a publication, blogger, publi…

FalseFacebook Paper: the video. Click the #fbpaper tag for some thoughts.

"You also can't add any site you want, as with a traditional RSS reader. Instead, Facebook has hired a team of content curators to pick stories for you in one of a dozen or so categories ranging from basic news to cute animals." - With Paper, Facebook just blew its own iPhone app out of the water | The Verge

Interesting points emerging from the first two articles I’ve seen about Jason Calacanis’ his new venture, Inside.com.

"a new kind of reblogging functionality so that readers can top the articles they share with their own headlines and introductions.... “Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers. And at some point the distinction should become meaningless."