Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

"the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers" with most of the top writers making "seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers".Talent making money direct from audience is not limited to journalists on substack: try "a…

Today's social platforms' business models are not inevitable, but because we see them as such we constrain "the solution space we consider for combatting mis-/disinformation, polarization, and promotion of extremism... we need to consider what technologies [and] digital media to have a productive role in democratic societies".H…

The fact that this is actually necessary is saddening: "practical, nonpartisan, evidence-based recommendations to journalists covering the 2020 U.S. presidential election", including how to cover an election amid attempts to undermine it; what to do in the case of a contested result or Trump doesn't concede; and "what to do if …

This edition’s 9 articles span the real meaning of “foreign meddling” and domestic flashpoints, social media platform preparations for Election Night and beyond, and how media has to go beyond factchecking as it tackles “pink slime” (yes, it’s a thing).

The president’s reelection campaign ... multimillion-dollar ad blitz ... shaping Americans’ understanding of ... impeachment ... micro-targeted ads ... portraying Trump as a heroic reformer ... while Democrats plotted a coup... An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape ... I wanted to see it from the inside...I was surprised by the effec…

my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.” Well, almost... The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem... A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me ... orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in …

marginalization of those with radical critiques... poisoning both the right and the left ...resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex ... Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging ... Sarah Palin and Donald Trump reintroduc…

For the 6th episode of his Futurized podcast, Trond Undheim asked me why surveillance capitalism inevitably leads to polarised, undemocratic and dysfunctional societies, and what we must do about it...If we don’t change course, in the future we will be less will informed, more polarised, massively manipulated, living in more corrupt and less democ…

the vast majority of our panel of 200 participants could easily spot fake news... many instead referenced ... government or media misinformation ... less aware ... how the pandemic is being handled ... underestimated the UK’s death toll...many believed a greater emphasis on fact-checking would enhance rather than undermine public trust in journali…

The rage-engage cycle is a key part of how malign narratives gain traction on social media... into traditional media... disinformation content is designed to be polarizing... exploits the business models of social media... pointing out that something is false and dangerous ... giving more oxygen to the fire... [Trump] tests and revises purposefull…

we needed to take investigative journalism and combine it with technology to build communities of action... I went from managing 1,000 journalists to 12 people...Our information ecosystem has already been destroyed. We’ve been poisoned... We were the third [news outlet] attacked... we stood up because we have no other business interests...In the o…

Every feature that adtech is bragging on, or working toward? Email spam had it in the 1990s... staying away from spam was the right answer... spam from a high-reputation brand doesn’t look any different from spam that any fly-by-night operation can send...The “new reality,”... is a place where you win based not on how much the audience trusts you,…

Watching Silicon Valley exercise news judgment has been like watching Walter Cronkite try to write code in Python... Four companies have created trustworthiness indicators for news websites: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and NewsGuard. Publishers have no way of learning their secret trust score from the Silicon Valley companies. NewsGuard’s journalis…

the lean canvas... single-page template designed to distil the fundamental goals and objectives of a business, and offer a clear route to achieving them... to design a product around perceived market and consumer variables... In about 45 minutes ... journalists learned how to apply this framework to their news organisation’s editorial and business…

for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…

In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…

Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what they …

with influencer marketing en vogue and publishers hunting for ways to drive engagement on their properties, the hunt for famous, influential contributors is back on... eg Axios has two people... recruiting, managing subject matter experts to participate in Expert Voices... invite-only contributor network... Find influential people, bring them into…

Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like.

We don’t charge for hosting, we never put ads on your content or share your data, and we will only put your story behind the Medium paywall if you choose to take advantage of Medium distribution beyond your followers.... We recommend stories to millions of Medium readers every day on our personalized home page, in our email digests, and in our mob…

In all the urgent debate about regulating, investigating, and even breaking up internet companies, we have lost sight of the problem we are trying to confront: not technology but instead human behaviour on it... in their search for someone to blame, government outsource fault and responsibility, egged on by media (whose schadenfreude constitutes …

To counter disinformation and revalue quality journalism we need a competitive ecosystem of credibility indexes to stimulate innovation and avoid a Ministry of Truth, de facto or otherwise.- more on Medium

these technologies ... kind of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the human will. Our phones are the operating system for our life. They keep us looking and clicking... wears down certain capacities, like willpower... repeated distractions lower people’s effective IQ by up to 10 points... over twice ... that ... from long-term marijuana usage....…

it just felt like the conversations that we were having subsequently were actually pretty shallow and actually pretty useless, because we were talking over each other because everybody meant different things... we can only really start talking about interventions if we understand what we’re talking about... I say, “Please don’t use the term.” “Yea…

Fake News is suddenly on the boil in the Brussels Bubble. Here are some ideas I brainstormed earlier this week. Comments welcome.

Even in a world where people increasingly get news from social media, the professional news media is still seen as largely to blame for low trust... Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism examines the underlying reasons for trust and distrust ...Bias, spin and hidden agendas come across as the main reasons...perceived decline in journalisti…

“We wanted democracy... but got mobocracy.”... Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year... “we need to reform our attention economy.”... groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media... developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas..…

Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground... Your captive attention is worth billions ... This has actually changed how you see the world... walls of code have turned you into a predictable asset — a user that can be mined for attention... by focusing on one over-simplified metric, one that suppor…

the best gift the publishing industry could hope for... digital advertising technology that will be most frozen by limitations - and that is good news for content makers... collection and processing of the kind of data essential to ad targeting must now be explicitly consented to by readers. Furthermore, consumers will have the right to erase data…

"Internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas..." plus a lot more: it's a 100+page report