Overview: Communications Tactics

The seminal launch 538 launch post: "... while the first two steps of the process (collecting and organizing information in the form of news stories) are thought to fall within the province of “objective” journalism, explanatory journalism is sometimes placed in the category of “opinion journalism.” ... [which] doesn’t seem to abide by the standa…

A useful look at how user-centricity has leapt out of the web department and into the business strategy: "... Quartz ... Gawker, BuzzFeed and Tumblr... are increasingly thinking about what they do as providing a service, not just as a business that generates content and then delivers it to people.... you have to experiment, and iterate rapidly, …

"This is a Big Deal for a lot of people right now, because the software companies that support our social lives have become so evil and pervasive and controlling in recent years." - What Does Ethical Social Networking Software Look Like? — The Message — Medium

"What's fascinating about Longform isn't its success... but how it went from a fairly simple website to an ambitious world-changing platform by nothing more than user feedback. No abstract theories... Just the simple power of going iteratively from MVP to a product people want... the new Longform app allows you to follow individual writers' wor…

"The New York Times today introduced “Watching,” a major new feature on the NYTimes.com homepage on desktop and on the mobile website. Watching is a stream of developing and noteworthy news designed to amplify the scope and urgency of The Times’s digital report. Watching offers a tailored feed of the news of the moment, such as early outlines of …

"The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us... it turns out to be boring.... if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning... Information is ... an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense ... the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchem…

As commented on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/New-Narrative-Europe-closing-event-4203563.S.5916497700450234368), a poll with an interesting set of options to choose from: "Do you: a) Love Europe as a state of mind? b) Love Europe as a solution to the challenges we face together? c) Love Europe for its victory over the barriers which o…

Great piece on corporate journalism from the FT. "The Richmond Standard is one of the more polished sites to emerge in the age of hyper-local digital news brands such as Patch and DNAinfo.com... it is run and funded by Chevron, the $240bn oil group which owns the Richmond refinery that in August 2012 caught fire... sending more than 15,000 reside…

"think-tanks, the semi-academic institutions that come up with ideas for politicians [are] increasingly doing journalism—not just blogging and tweeting but foreign reporting, too. Deskbound journalists, meanwhile, are embracing data and spreadsheets." Really? Think tanks are basically glorified PR firms for political movements/parties, so this mo…

"Corporations are tempted to take over journalism with increasingly better contents. ... dangers and hopes for new revenue streams." Interesting figures on the decline in journalists and the rise of PR specialists, cause by 2 trends: "while the journalistic staffing is shrinking dramatically ... the public relation crowd is rising in a spectacul…

"...another link in a chain of legal rulings that help establish the idea that bloggers - and other members of ... "the networked fourth estate," ... can be seen as performing acts of journalism... we need to protect acts of journalism, not just specific actors who engage in them. the First Amendment protects acts of journalism or publishing — …

Others have written on the return of the enewsletter, but I don't think anyone saw it as the home page: "Yes, the homepage is still dead, which is why our new front door is quite different from most. ... we are offering an efficient briefing on global business news, ... intended to be read straight through, like a well written memo from a trusted…

"more publishers are trying to opt out of the pageview rat race.... The Financial Times will next month begin selling time by the hour for any ad ... The Economist Group is rolling out a new set of “dynamic attention metrics” to help advertisers buy time rather than impressions for their ads."... The rise of clickbait ... can be tracked back to …

"when an email newsletter, which looks look superb on desktop, fails to render properly on a mobile device, respondents either hit delete or unsubscribe." - Responsive Email Design: Benefits, How-To, Examples + More | JUST™ Creative

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".

On #icebucketchallenge, obviously. - I Scream, You Scream, We all Scream ‘Look at Me’ | LinkedIn

"As #ISISMediaBlackout gathered pace it became one of the world's first anti-viral virals. Tweeted around 20,000 times, it managed to eclipse the content itself. #ISISMediaBlackout might be a sign that social media is taking the step forwards that it most badly needs.... It needs digital citizenship, the realisation that our behaviour online a…

"The process of placing an ad on News Feed is a complicated dance. Facebook has to decide not only which ad to show to its users, but when to show it to them... any given user has around 1,500 stories they could see each day. ... a rather complex algorithm that weights how engaging each post is ... and a wide range of other signals ... For examp…

"Brands that try to get in on the social conversation around 9/11 can come off as crass and opportunistic. " "can" come off as crass?? Really? This is the crassest thing I can imagine. - This Guy's Replies to 9/11 Brand Tweets Sum Up Everything That's Wrong With 9/11 Brand Tweets | Adweek

"Displaying data can be a tricky proposition, because different rules apply in different contexts. A sales director presenting financial projections to a group of field reps wouldn’t visualize her data the same way that a design consultant would in a written proposal to a potential client. So how do you make the right choices for your situation? …

"Chartist is noteworthy because it doesn't just make existing charts smaller or bigger, it changes the the way the data is displayed so that it makes sense on whichever size screen it's being viewed on. A chart showing each of the 12 months along its x axis when displayed in a full-width browser window, for example, will change to show only six m…

"I do think that as waves of smart people hit the limits of their frustration with Twitter and Facebook, many will look around and realize, hey, this blogging thing still makes a great deal of sense. "

Nicholas Carr is: "By Big Internet, I mean the platform- and plantation-based internet, the one centered around giants like Google and Facebook and Twitter and Amazon and Apple. Maybe these companies were insurgents at one point, but now they’re fat and bland and obsessed with expanding or defending their empires. They’ve become the Henry VIIIs…

"There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. God, yes - see Where to find me, Oct 2013: http://mathew.blogactiv.eu/2013/10/02/where-to-find-me/

"People are talking about blogs. Again! And not just random nameless “people” cited in some clueless trend story. Specific people are talking about reviving their actual blogs. In some cases, they are even following through."

"Facebook seems to be trying to get more transparent about how the algorithms ... function, with a statement on Monday about cracking down on “clickbait.” ... But despite the attempts at openness, the bottom line remains the same: Facebook is a black box. No one really has any clue why the site chooses to show or hide certain content... what com…

"... you have two sides facing each other: the Social Login providers who say that it's a must to drive more conversions, and the cool outsiders who state that "it doesn't worth it, that it screws up your UX and that it's intrusive." The Social Login landscape is full of traps, let's see how to avoid them." - 7 Social Login Myths Debunked — Abou…

"Few pieces of journalism — let alone narrative journalism — effect change in a matter of hours. But that’s what happened with “Working Anything but 9 to 5,” ... A rare combination of intimate narrative and exposé, Kantor’s Aug. 13 story followed a tumultuous month in the life of Jannette Navarro, a young single mother struggling to make ends me…

"Google Stories and ... Hangouts on Air will both play a role in initial experiments ... "Say the council is shutting down the swimming pool," she said of how Hangouts on Air may be used, "we can get a member of the community to talk to the chief executive of the council, what their plans are, why they're doing it. Then we can take that, repackag…

"The Guardian released a beta version of its new website to get reader feedback as it continues to tweak its design.... Content discovery is a major focus ... “container model” allows the paper to implement a responsive design while also retaining a story hierarchy, user experience director... Each item contains a story, which are put together…