Overview: Communications Tactics

at The Information, the subscription-based tech news publisher, comments and community aren’t just intact — they’re a selling point... The Information puts its members front and center. Subscribers get their own bio pages... its subscription call to action entreats visitors not to get access to great information or level up their tech and media k…

‘Ask’ enables editors to create embeddable forms to invite contributions from readers. These could come in several formats, including text, photo, video, audio. The contributions can be (optionally) linked to existing user profiles. Editors can filter, sort, share, and manage the contributions, and then display the best ones in a gallery.

I find value in reader comments that can’t be adequately reproduced elsewhere. The argument that the conversation has migrated to Facebook and Twitter is flawed. ... they are no substitute for having discussion take place where the story itself lives. ... News organizations should fix online comments rather than ditch them... the feedback is... f…

Since Facebook made its livestreaming feature widely available earlier this year, publishers have been experimenting with on-the-spot video in a variety of ways... we are starting a series of in-depth articles chronicling their experiments IBTimes UK has been working on three different live video formats: Q&As with columnists and reporters, panel…

BBC Business Unit has been experimenting with 'news you can use', a concept which mimics tutorials and informational videos popular with YouTube viewers, in a bid to engage a wider audience on social media... Using just his mobile phone, Shaw is able to shoot videos quickly and easily, wherever he can grab the interviewees.

Quick response to Baekdael’s Are you under estimating prototyping?, over on Medium: "Your excellent post reminds me of a participation project a few years ago for a government organisation. Ostensibly, it was going to ‘open up’ EU decisionmaking to the public ..."

prototyping is a great tool for developing user interfaces. But that is just the tip of the iceberg... you can prototype pretty much anything. Anything from a customer service interaction to streamlining a factory line process. Here are just a few ways prototyping could improve the user experience... They are a great collaboration tool. Instead…

Had a great time setting up and running a blogging competition for the EU Commission’s Regional Policy department. It’s not over yet, though: the three winners announced today are coming to Brussels this October as fully accredited journalists to European Week of Regions and Cities. 

We’re serious journalists who understand audiences and analytics. But we see a plethora of story ideas — and people — in all of that data.

some examples of a blended interface, bringing the best of the command line and GUI paradigms together... — notifications and quick input from the conversational side, along with a rich and intuitive experience from the GUI side... Each message has the potential to be a ,,, bite size applications like a photo carousel, media players, mini games, i…

This new tool shows users what Facebook determines are their interests... has provided a glance into the deep flaws of Facebook’s interest targeting. Advertisers should be concerned about where their dollars are going... Here are the main flaws I came across:... I would just recommend approaching targeting differently:

as news outlets tailor their content to addictive platforms to pump up traffic, the distinction between consuming journalism and being wedded to “emails, constant notifications, and social media” is increasingly meaningless... if we are what and how we read, then our thinking will mirror the scattered and shallow tendencies of Web browsing.... …

publishers are afraid that while the AMP project is nominally open-source, Google is using it to shape how the mobile web works, and in particular, to ensure a steady stream of advertising revenue

my view of the many different types of visualizations available to us when we encode and present data... We’ve plotted nearly 90 different graphics across five main categories: Distribution, Time, Comparing Categories, Geospatial, Part-to-Whole, and Relationships. The space does not include every type of graphic, nor does it display every link bet…

The Guardian joins the Financial Times and the Economist in billing ads by time.... have found, unsurprisingly, that ads perform better when people spend more engaged time with them.... click-through rate as an industry benchmark for performance;. However a metric of 0.0 something percent should not be seen as a succes

IT’S been just over four months since The New York Times started producing live video for Facebook... a lot should never have made the team... many that are either plagued by technical malfunctions, feel contrived, drone on too long, ignore audience questions or are simply boring... For The Times the goal is twofold... to develop video that appea…

Deepstream makes it easy to remix one or more livestreams by adding context and background... by introducing a new role into the livestreaming ecosystem: the curator... easily embed live video into a player that includes context cards... set up with just a few clicks to feature news stories, polls, maps, tweets, free text and more to help you expl…

covering trials can be tricky... trials don’t always unfold in orderly narratives. Instead, they develop in fits and starts, depending on which witnesses are called and which exhibits the prosecution and defense choose to enter.... attorneys don't actually build narrative... The challenge... to create a way to track those arguments as they're made…

summary of Kevin Kelly’s Seminar “The Next 30 Digital Years”, ... part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress...

No matter what the original post was about, a handful of the loudest — or most committed — voices in the room hijacked the comments thread to push their own agendas. Anyone trying to urge the conversation back to the topic at hand ...was shouted down and shamed... comments sections aren't fostering conversation, they are killing it. A very small…

the company's newest tweak to its membership program is one that puts listeners in direct conversation with the company's staffers. The idea: Give Gimlet's members access to the company's Slack team

The New York Times is acquiring a marketing agency... Fake Love, an agency that specializes in live experiences, virtual and augmented reality... to grow its revenue in part by offering more ad agency services,.. I’m getting daily requests for [augmented reality]... chatbots. And VR, the market is already hot.

David and Petros were there to conduct the FT’s first experiment with livestreaming 360-degree video... we failed to produce a watchable live stream... we learnt eight specific lessons for next time:

A couple of months ago I included augmented and virtual reality in Top3ics, my occasional newsletter, adding “Consider these as first notes towards a future post.” I then forgot about it. Thanks, Newt Gingrich!

The public is no longer uninformed. They are misinformed, and that requires an entirely different editorial focus ... just reporting the news doesn't actually solve the public's needs. Now your focus must be on explaining the news instead.... the newspaper is stuck in an existential crisis ... stop being a newspaper and start being something el…

For the purposes of this post, let’s narrow landing pages down to those connected to content marketing or email marketing campaigns, and meant to generate conversions, bearing in mind those conversions may not necessarily be revenue-generating sales.

enterprise software helps the user answer one or more of the following questions:What’s important? (Surface relevant information)What do I do next? (Support decision making)How do I do it? (Facilitate action)... the conversational interface answers all three of the above questions better than the software tools we have today... Dashboards today …

f our e-mail inboxes can be kept relatively spam-free, why can’t machines automatically purge abusive messages from tweets or comments?... a way of representing the meaning of words as vectors with many dimensions... “word embedding,” allows semantics to be processed in a sophisticated way. For instance, even if a comment contains a string of word…

Vox wants to move beyond the web page to tell compelling stories... That Clinton package was the first public product of the Vox Storytelling Studio... launching on the premise of hypercharging the concept of the story, using all resources available to transform the story into a experiential entity... publications and media companies must continue…

"If you're too metrics-driven, you're only going to be focused on what moves a particular metric, and you will use any hack or any trick or any deceptive technique to get there.".. many of the worst dark patterns are pushed by businesses, not by designers