Overview: Media

Interesting research: "Seventy different political posts were randomly either left to their own wild devices, engaged by an unidentified staffer from the station, or engaged by a prominent political reporter. When the reporter showed up, “incivility decreased by 17 percent and people were 15 percent more likely to use evidence in their comments on…

"With Hive, a developer can create assignments for users, define what they need to do, and keep track of their progress in helping to solve problems. " - The New York Times R&D Lab releases Hive, an open-source crowdsourcing tool » Nieman Journalism Lab

How much more could Google News be? See "... a presentation that a German designer came up with that involved a wholesale redesign and re-thinking of what Google News is and does." Lots of good stuff here. Particularly like how 'smart personalisation' is used to help penetrate the filter bubble: "automatically suggest related stories on a news t…

Is primetime TV advertising the right way to connect citizens to the EU?

"Although Serial’s audience has broken records, it  is far from the only podcast that enjoys serious listener engagement —successful podcasts often have that ability to move audiences... “It’s on-demand, so people are actively choosing what they want to listen to, stories are delivered with a human voice and personality. The intimacy of radio i…

Interesting description of the benefits of being a 'fast follower' by The Economist's Paul Rossi: "instilling a culture across the business where staff are keeping an eye on what's going on ...the editorial side [is] ... actively talking to people about new technologies. How to deliver content, how to deliver video... on the commercial team everbo…

"Readers spend a lot of time on RealClear's sites... because there's a seemingly endless amount of well-curated links to top publications writing about the big news stories of any given day... The result is a true smorgasbord of opinion, rather than a collection of links aimed at furthering a particular point of view... The expert level of curati…

Really good longread on where journalism is now, and some ideas of where it needs to go. "The public sphere is now operated by a small number of private companies, based in Silicon Valley... a defining issue not just for journalism but the whole of society... social media platforms ... have abdicated editorial responsibilities to software and al…

Good overview of the year+ - long debate about comments, trolls & social media, "from the baby-and-the-bathwater dept ... This sudden disdain for traditional comments raises the question: is Facebook somehow immune to stupid comments? Is forcing all news conversation on to Facebook's terms really an improvement in meaningful dialogue?... It's lik…

(FT paywall) "Serial’s success is the most visible example of a renaissance in podcasting – a format that has been around for a decade but which has received a recent surge of interest from consumers, investors and advertisers." Massively underused medium for EU comms, IMHO. - Podcasting poised to go from niche to mainstream - FT.com

Overpriced and under-powered?

Interesting reaction to Reuters, who argued "Much of the well-informed and articulate discussion around news... has moved to social media and online forums... But is that enough justification for giving up comments? ... not everyone is on Twitter, and not everyone is on Facebook, and so any conversation or interaction that occurs there will be in…

"Trove wants to get to the holy grail of content by combining the power of algorithmic filtering and the abilities of human curators. So Trove allows you to follow curators and their news-feeds, but also recommends articles and topics based on what it knows about you " - Slashdot founder Rob Malda on Trove and fixing the problem with Twitter — Te…

"Politico has redesigned its website for the first time in its seven year history, and The Guardian's U.S. recent refresh marks the first time it's redesigned almost entirely in public, with its readers' input. Here's a look at the thinking behind the redesigns, and what the publishers were able to pull off." - Politico, HBR, The Guardian: W…

"a closer look at what types of comment sections news organizations are using, and what, if any, value they are adding ... reviewed academic and industry literature, spoke with industry managers and university researchers and conducted a small poll ... The result is a list of questions to ask and best practices for news organizations seeking retu…

"the point of any headline is to draw readers into a story. Rather, what makes clickbait clickbait is the letdown you feel when the story doesn’t deliver on the headline’s promise.... these cynical ploys are partly a product of an online-media business model that revolves around page-views and banner ads.... BuzzFeed and Vice are in the vanguard…

"The latest trend in storytelling is not driven by super-innovative technology. It requires no expensive accessories and is accessible to all ages and backgrounds. It’s called LISTENING." Gotta love an article which starts like that! Apart from the practical guidelines promised, I liked its observation "about the temporal nature of sound - unable…

"Cell phones and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are playing an increasingly prominent role in how voters get political information and follow election news, according to a new national survey by the Pew Research Center." Interesting that Republicans are more suspicious of "traditional media filters", given Fox News. - Cell Phon…

"One of the standout features of the recent resurgence of email newsletters from news outlets has been a focus on providing an aggregated experience that encompasses what other publications produce.... the idea is to pick the best and most relevant content, whether it comes from their own stable or someone else's... by producing the highest qual…

"a lot of great content was getting lost in the shuffle, because there weren't enough discovery tools... when a user pulls up the topic picker, each choice reveals other sub-topics that might be of interest. Flipboard used to offer 30 topics, but now it offers a total of 34,000 ... it's deep topic analysis - we use it to surface what other p…

Perhaps a glimpse of Axel Springer's plans for @politicoEU? "Publishers set the prices for how much each of their articles cost, and keep 70 percent of the revenue generated from those stories. Blendle takes the other 30 percent. " - The New York Times Co. and Axel Springer are investing €3 million in Dutch startup Blendle » Nieman Journalism Lab

"Swarmize enables journalists to tell new, collaborative stories by making use of real-time data collection and visualisation" Just the tests they've already done are awesome. The code's on GitHub. Think to use in surveys, real-time social media monitoring, live blogs ... anything where real-time is useful and/or you might want a second bite at t…

"we are kicking off the relaunch of The Lede with a three-part series on content strategy... we begin with an element of content strategy that often gets overlooked … but that is crucial to understanding your audience intimately enough to influence it." Hint: it's AUDIENCE. And it's a podcast, so grab it and give it a listen tomorrow morning on y…

"Facebook say that the more time users spend at its site, the more likely there will be a robust exchange of diverse viewpoints and ideas shared online. Others fear that users will create their own echo chambers, and filter out coverage they do not agree with. ... [that] “is when you get conspiracy theories.” - How Facebook Is Changing the Way It…

"publishers [could] simply send pages to Facebook ... hosted by its servers ... with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared. That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers... Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns." - Facebook Offers Li…

"The Post’s suite of Web apps presents a more specialized alternative to traditional do-it-all content management systems like Drupal... Currently in development at The Post is an application tentatively titled “Storybuilder,” ... including a feature ... to create an index of facts associated with each story. Using this index, Storybuilder could…

"The news media sector has become heavily dependent on traffic from Facebook and Google. A reliance now dangerously close to addiction. Maybe it’s time to refocus on direct access... Which company in the world wouldn’t be seen as fragile when depending so much on a small set of uncontrollable distributors? for a news, value-added type media, the…

After the standard survey of Facebook's impact on news & democracy, an interesting analysis of the way Facebook's: "trending topics has had a deeply pernicious effect on the way news is produced... encourages publications to look for what's trending and pump out something on that subject as quickly as possible... lots of quickly aggregated p…

“Go in and add some information, thank them for finding mistakes, thank them for adding information on their own ... You want to have a dialogue with them.” Well, duh. - Eight best practices for journalists who reply to online comments | Current.org

"There are three simple cardinal rules of being an ethical aggregator:" ... and because I'm following them, please click on the link below to discover what they are. - We're all aggregators now : Columbia Journalism Review