Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

On fully eight of the nine measures, “polarization increases more for the old than the young.” If Facebook is the problem, then how come the problem is worst among those who don’t use Facebook? ... polarization is accelerating fastest among those using the internet the least... social media is important. It’s just not the whole picture... two mai…

We have ideas for sponsored Codas, that are of interest to specific groups.

Do we really want to set up Facebook or Google as censors ... to decide what is real and fake, true and false?

Today, the newsletter is a petri dish, where audience-development teams tinker .... Publishers that treated email as its own animal saw benefits including massive boosts in traffic and upticks in digital subscribers... subscribers are disproportionately loyal ... an ideal group to test ideas on

many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”... if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth... when confron…

Two convergent trends are making populism a potent negative force. First, democracies have morphed into unrepresentative plutocracies that lead growing numbers of people to feel shut out and voiceless... Media ... business model is now based on social media and clicks, not facts. Clicks depend on theatrical performance, stunts, celebrity, ent…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…

two products, Springboard and Time Inc. Connect to help editors source content from contributors, some for traditional editorial content and some for native or branded content... a way for editors to create more content around specific topics or events rather than just getting content on the cheap... gathering ... people with some degree of social…

“a monopoly of content distribution that will be mainly driven by user-generated content, and by professional content by commercially interested players.... pretty traumatic scenario of information or propaganda. It will be very painful for democracies.”

You may not care about social media now, but if you read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV, then it’s shaping your world already... The real game is hardening your own support in ways dramatic enough to be picked up by the mass media ... the easiest way of doing that is to pick a rollicking fight... Lacking an established political mac…

some advice on how to best approach analytics in the newsroom, helping journalists improve the quality of their content, and a build larger, more engaged readership. Here are five key takeaways

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the impact of social media on news; technologies like augmented reality; and the impact of both on society. It is the first time these Top3ics have meshed so perfectly in one month.

Think about platforms as fishing places where you can find large, engaged audiences and build a relationship with them by providing content. Then offer these users some other services off-platform... Never outsource the future... a great primer for news organizations just starting to tackle the distributed world and a good checklist for those mor…

Publications are hiring a point person to coordinate with new platforms like Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat Discover... product changes of platforms happen on a daily basis. Just to track those changes and newly emerging platforms is a full-time job in itself

Last spring, the Financial Times altered its former metered access model and introduced paid trials, letting users pay £1 ($1.42) for a month’s access to content. At the same time, the newspaper also changed its policies toward social platforms and began making more content free to people coming to its site from Google, Facebook and Twitter. It la…

At The Guardian’s Media Summit in London, those publishers and others discussed what’s working for them with their platform strategies, and how sustainable off-site publishing is likely to be for media companies in the long term... Cosmo’s Snapchat Discover editions get 76 percent completion rates... 56 percent ... coming back to us five days …

Email, for all the claims of it being dead, is critical for many publishers as a distribution (and marketing) channel they continue to control... Email newsletters have become an important part of publishers’ audience development strategies as a way to deepen their relationship with readers by providing an antidote to the endless stream of news in…

The institutional brand building you create by having your journalists be great on social platforms cannot be underestimated. Part of having your journalists on these platforms is giving them the freedom to be a normal human being, not a robot, a PR machine or a slave to the wire.

Facebook’s Notes feature is giving The Boston Globe another way to post directly to the Facebook platform... Notes, an early Facebook staple, stagnated for years until last September, when Facebook updated the feature with a cleaner, more customizable design and editing tool reminiscent of Medium. Unlike video posted directly to Facebook, there’s…

Betts ... became the first data head to join the publisher’s board, recognizing data’s importance in growing its subscriptions and audience. Today, he heads up a 30-person team focused on customer analytics and research. Here are lessons from Betts on data maturity and driving audience engagement... While subscriptions are critical ... it’s not t…

the hallmark of a good branded podcast is that the marketing is subtle... this is something where you want to build a long-term relationship with people. It’s not about short-term conversions, or anything like that, but about having an amazing first experience with a brand.

Publishers are placing big bets on social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, praying that fishing for audiences outside their owned sites will eventually pay off in new readers and advertising... it’s still a gamble... payoff in audience and ad dollars is uncertain. Plus, fishing expeditions are hardly free. Hiring more staff is just part of t…

benefit of building a brand that audiences recognize ... allow us to build a strong revenue model and a strong connection to an audience. If they see us on Snapchat and Snapchat has a very large audience, then they get to know and trust Vox and see it as a source that they care about... think about your brand as an interconnected ethos that should…

first U.S. newspaper and first business publication available on the platform ... (U.K.’s Daily Mail is also there).... team consists of five people who will publish eight items each weekday ... “a mix of core coverage, such as Markets, Business, and World news, and the luxury and lifestyle features that we believe provide the perfect snackable c…

We sift through the academic journals so you don’t have to. Here are 10 of the most interesting studies about social and digital media published in 2015.

the Internet now seems to be on constant boil... extremists of all stripes are ascendant, and just about everywhere you look, much of the Internet is terrible...social networks seem to be feeding a cycle of action and reaction. In just about every news event, the Internet’s reaction to the situation becomes a follow-on part of the story, so that …

We are creating open-source tools and resources for publishers of all sizes to build better communities around their journalism. We also collect, support, and share practices, tools, and studies to improve communities on the web. All of our tools are open source and free... small, flexible tools that plug into each other and also work with exist…

a new wave of “homeless” media companies that don’t require a home page; their sole purpose is to syndicate content.... With native content consumption on third-party platforms growing, will it still be relevant for media companies to invest significant resources on running and maintaining their websites and mobile apps?