Overview: Media

Axel Springer, wary of being overly dependent on third-party platforms for traffic... fighting back by launching its own news aggregator platform... now has around 1,200 publishers on board ... Digiday spoke with Würtenberger, CEO of Upday, about using humans and algorithms for news sourcing, creating a platform for publishers and banning ad block…

Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services... social engagement could solve the conversion challenge ... users enjoy free content that the website provides but are unwilling to contribute to the site monetarily. The bad news is that it’s not enough to just add participatory optio…

Brands have always had a tougher time spreading messages on Facebook than individuals, because they’re playing in a space that’s fundamentally not designed for them... What if our kids find the idea of any brands communicating as if they’re people even more awkward than we do? there are opportunities to re-think the role publishing plays in soci…

Asking humans to judge each other can be a surprisingly powerful thing... But invoking a sense of being watched isn’t the only way platforms subliminally encourage social behaviour... persuasive design: if you want people to do something, don’t explain why, just show them how... If extremists seek to spread fear and shock, counterspeech might aim…

News organisations are increasingly embracing the use of analytics and metrics as part of editorial decision making, but what constitutes a sophisticated analytics strategy?... A new report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism looks at which organisations are building a competitive advantage over less advanced competitors through a…

a phone company, Three, is introducing adblocking across its network.... Mobile advertising is still a very small revenue stream for most publishers, but in many cases it is the only one showing any growth...Unless and until this is killed by the European regulators, it threatens to snuff out the lifeline of mobile advertising for digital publishe…

From Kickstarter’s April 2009 launch through the end of the year, 17 journalism projects received funding. That number more than tripled just a year later ... 168 funded projects in 2014 and 173 in the first nine months of 2015... from $49,256 in 2009 and $263,352 in 2010 to $1,743,668 in the first nine months of 2015... number of people contribu…

This is a completely new way to launch a media startup,... Most startups start with VC funding or a foundation grant or corporate support and then go chasing after an audience. But our crowdfunding approach means that #EmergingUS will be built on an audience of thousands... treated as real stakeholders. They'll play a big role in shaping the cont…

What if we viewed investigative reporting more broadly ... used our skills (and the financial resources of many investigative teams) to bring people together to solve problems?... The Tribune didn’t just report on what scientists were doing. We came to them with an ambitious idea, connected them to other top researchers and then became an impor…

"We put aside existing notions about news apps and imagined what our journalism would be if it lived natively on your iPhone. It wouldn’t be a facsimile of our website. It would be something entirely different, with original writing, new features, and a fresh interface."... The Quartz news app isn't for everybody ... the app is by design unlikely…

... manually curate 10 stories from other publishers, which will run as a daily edition. Three different articles, often with opposing viewpoints, will run on each story, representing the left, neutral and right-wing political perspectives on the same story... For example, in Wednesday’s edition, it ran a Guardian story entitled “Terrorism publ…

The afternoon session at Future Media Lab 2016 showed that while European media are warming to the idea of using advanced language technologies to share content across borders, their audiences are already well ahead of them.

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…

For some news organisations, packaging and distributing news on social media falls under the remit of the engagement team. For others, the task is assigned to a distributed news team or to a social content studio within the editorial department.This is the third in a series of articles on how news for social is produced... BuzzFeed Distributed i…

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…

Over the last six months we’ve been collaborating with The Atlantic to bring three interactive articles to life... We set out to create an immersive, yet thoughtful reading experience and I’d like to share some of our insights that helped get us there... live site here: http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/athenahealth/.. we decided to build an …

The Wall Street Journal, claims it has been the Journal’s fastest-growing social channel, reaching over 2 million followers since it launched on the Japanese app 15 months ago... Publishers like The Economist, BBC and Mashable have all added Line to their social media arsenal

"It tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline."

Advertisers have to spend $250,000 in native plus display over 60 days (up from the minimum BrandVoice package of $150,000). If they don’t get a lift in at least one of four metrics (awareness, favorability, recall, purchase intent), they get their money back.

At work here is what is called, variously, “social syndication” or “traffic exchange,” a technique increasingly in vogue among publishers looking to get their articles and brands in front of other readers ... help them extend the reach ... fill in the gaps in their own social programming with stories that they didn’t or couldn’t write themselves

The Conversation U.S. saw 540,000 unique visitors to its main site last month, but because all of its pieces are published under a Creative Commons license ... it’s reached an audience of 5.5 million... recently announced 19 public and private research universities across the U.S. as its “founding partners.” ... pay a yearly fee and get access to…

“Innovation is not just a cool thing. It’s not just a process. It’s a culture. We research. We design. We build.” Innovation should not compete with the daily grind of the company, it must emerge from it

we’re seeing early signs that the value of a mobile user is greater than a desktop user... Facebook’s... shift from desktop to mobile has led to much higher engagement and average revenue... exactly the opposite of what everyone predicted. investing millions in rich video experiences... But isn’t a larger screen more immersive than a small mobil…

Platforms are eating publishers... The idea that Facebook and its ilk could act as information gatekeepers is also a bleak prospect... Facebook wouldn’t allow The New Republic to create an ad for an innocuous piece on medical marijuana ... If Facebook is squeamish about medical marijuana now, imagine the state of the fourth estate once controversy…

The time has come for The Guardian to make it on its own. Last week, the paper laid out a three-year plan to cut 20 percent of its losses... a re-vamped membership scheme, centralized data teams and a new ad model focusing on video and branded content. Here’s how the Guardian can drive a profit.

the new application is to deliver a round-up of curated news stories to readers, meant to be viewed first thing in the morning ... presented on eight different cards... the app’s content is able to be digested fairly quickly. Users can ... clicking a link to view the longer article, but they can also just use Refinery29 This AM to flip through car…

Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton was an extreme skeptic of publishers relying too heavily on Facebook. Now he's ... “all in” on publishing directly to Facebook with its Instant Articles program, a backtracking on Denton’s well-publicized lament that publishers are too reliant on platforms...Facebook, with its deep pool of accurate user data, can help …

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