Overview: Media

People who advocate for comments on social media ... often argue that Twitter and Facebook engender higher-quality discussion in part because commenters are (usually) attached to real names ... [but] Twitter trolls are rampant, too. And a retweet or quick comment isn’t exactly the same as a thoughtful response. So recently we’ve seen a couple o…

Extinction-level events have more or less become the new normal in the news business... journalism should have been wiped out by now. And yet it’s surprisingly resilient ... necessary to step back from the #contentwars and start, well, building new things. Every minute spent debating whether bloggers are journalists... is time not spent making …

news operations  are... losing a degree of ownership over their audiences... the number of people they reach is potentially greater than ever [but] through much larger third parties... coming to terms with just how directly their industry’s business model is coming into competition with that of their new, and much larger, partners... The tec…

There's never been a better time to innovate in media, so it's good to be back to EurActiv. Eight years ago I helped launch BlogActiv, before leaving for the world of EU communications agencies. Give or take a month or two, my 6-month stint fell in the middle of EurActiv's 15 years of life so far. It's good to be back, albeit p…

In this week’s edition, a months’ reading - some 30 posts - on social media, digital transformation, content/system design and EuroPCom2015. But first some news from me

A quick post to Medium in response to: Facebook Will Be Every Publisher’s CMS And That Is Probably A Good Thing: For a publisher to adopt Facebook as their CMS would be a form of surrender, handing over their future to someone else. - I don’t know if you’re wrong, but I hope you are — Medium

I feel reasonably confident that within the next 6–12 months, you will only see Instant Articles in the mobile newsfeed. Why? Because they are better... they will eventually be available on all Facebook environments. There is seemingly nothing stopping Facebook from rolling out a full front-end to the product so writers can produce directly in …

Blog posts take hours to write, those great images need to be found or created and those social networks need to be managed and nurtured. It is often not done or persisted with because there are no apparent quick rewards. This is where the tortoise can beat the hare by slow persistence. It is a marathon and a journey not a sprint... you are bui…

The List App has already drawn interest from a slew of news organizations... We talked to audience development experts ... figure out which strategies appear to be working well and get a sense of the app’s possibilities... Posts that typically do well manage to be simultaneously entertaining and informative, combining a light tone with a list o…

Facebook and Apple... have chosen to focus on a future that takes the shape of an article... largely developed in response to the constraints of print ... a great opportunity for news organizations themselves to rethink those assumptions... considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate …

publications, where people are carefully curating great content around particular topics, themes, and ideas Here are eleven great publications that you might want to follow today:

Here’s what we’re doing so far on Makerbase to discourage abuse before it starts and address it right away when it does happen. - 8 Steps for Preventing Abuse in a Web Community — Making Makerbase — Medium

Garnish your post with a photo of a cute little kitten and animal-lovers will flock to your button like zombies to a brain smorgasbord... good writing ... does not presently guarantee an audience on Medium... risks becoming a click-bait factory, a lame production line pumping out articles around the same limited themes...it needs to radically i…

As we head deeper into the annual bloodletting that is news media budgeting for the new year, here are 10 of my top questions that I think we’ll talking about into 2016.... (my faves): Vice, Vox Media, and BuzzFeed have seen hundreds of millions in investment... we have word that Business Insider will test reader revenue... Who will follow s…

The hip but not trendy City Room launched on June 14, 2007, a year when “blogs were the wave of the future.”... The difference between a blog and a news site is no longer a meaningful distinction: all news is posted as soon as it breaks and is then updated. Just think: when was the last time someone used the word “bloggy” to describe the tone o…

Where I think Circa took a step forward ... the idea that we could ... take ANY story and add a structured element to it — even if the only structure was “this item read, this item unread.”.. I do think there are a few concepts that Circa created and executed upon that were truly “inventions”... The concept of atomizing news ... allowing a r…

the next phase of Medium is about linking writers with brands, with Medium acting as the go-between, vetting creators. Meaning, in part, a native advertising hub filled with long-tail content.... There’s going to be sponsorships and branded dollars on the platform. Our vision is to connect quality creators with brands who may want to work with the…

the value of curation combined with a second, algorithmic step: personalization. Fill a barrel with the best of the best. Now when I walk in, based on insights about my taste and what I’ve selected in the past, choose *for me* from the barrel. Wow! Thanks! - Why I Unfollowed You on Instagram — Medium

There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators... give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on... Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our ne…

… because in the past I used marginal notes to provide additional info, remarks and links without breaking the flow of my main text… Now it looks like I’m having a massively narcissistic conversation with myself & my Profile is a total mess

... because in the past I used marginal notes to provide additional info, remarks and links without breaking the flow of my main text.... I’ve just gone through one of my longest posts to turn all of my suddenly-set-to-Private notes into Responses. Now it looks like I’m having a massively narcissistic conversation with myself & my Profile is a tot…

VICE News, the journalism outfit within VICE Media's sprawling international empire, just added another outpost to its growing list of foreign editions... English-language expansions in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom allow the outlet to operate for 24 hours... Each edition can also cultivate local sources by writing primaril…

Millennials — a massive, influential demographic that grew up connected to the Internet, social platforms, and smart devices... have expectations about the reliability, tone, transparency, sharability, and relatability of the content they engage with. Newsrooms must meet and build upon these expectations to captivate a generation that is shapin…

Do people really want to have a conversation with brands, or their government?

In this week’s edition, two new social media products in one week; a few good longreads for the weekend; and more stuff for your online toolbox.

The code behind the effort is all available on Github... the fact that it uses an open repository doesn’t mean that Google isn’t running the project, or deciding what gets included and what doesn’t... publishers have another option ... simply take the best parts of the specification from the publicly available documentation and implement those …

"Accelerated Mobile Pages speed up mobile page load times through a new open framework called AMP HTML, which Google says "allows websites to build light-weight web pages." Google says it has nearly 30 publishers signed on to participate in the project, including The New York Times, Vox and Gannett." (What was the point posting each of the 6 ar…

the Google standard gives publishers a streamlined page-loading script they can use that takes advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make the various elements load faster...an order of magnitude faster than the typical mobile page... a completely open standard that any publisher can implemen…

Media Cloud... is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media... by collecting and analyzing the news stream of tens of thousands of online sources.... academic researchers, journalism critics, policy advocates, media scholars, and others c…

It’s hard to feel sorry for the news organizations that have utterly failed to pay enough attention to the top story of a generation. It’s one thing to bury the lede. It’s another to allow it to bury your industry... But ... the demise of reporting outfits ... is a severe blow to society. It represents the potential silencing of the only voice …