Overview: Media

Loved the spoken word form, was surprised at importance of paper quarterlies. "the 200 platforms at the Youth Media Summit had a combined audience of almost 4 million. With a new Ofcom study showing that 16- to 24-year-olds now use communications for an average of 14 hours and seven minutes a day, we asked them what youth media can teach the mai…

"There has been a lot of discussion lately about long-form content and how it is changing the content marketing playbook.... Is long-form content really worth the extra effort? It seems that way. SERPIQ recently completed an analysis of the top 10 search results for more than 20,000 keywords and revealed a surprising pattern. The length of cont…

Personalise your storytelling by mining your archives: The Australian launches Storyline: getting something out of its first 50 years and making it relevant to readers.

These figures need to be compared with other research shows that people seem happy to consume long articles on their mobiles. "Ad Age looked at ... Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger to see how their traffic has changed over the last year and what effect [mobile] has had on the time people spend with each service...." On the one hand we read about the …

"the data say longer form media is moving slowly across the social networks of distribution... two opposing trends going on simultaneously. On one end of the curve rabid sharing is driving an attention cycle of seconds but on the other end people are reading and watching more.... The social web has flattened web sites and made the home page…

In Germany, "the government forced Google to pay newspaper editors if they were included in Google News... Google excluded all newspapers from Google News and asked anyone wanting to be listed to reapply explicitly declaring that they renounced to be compensated. All newspaper did reapply not wanting to miss out on the traffic it generates. Google…

"Canadian researchers have confirmed what most people suspected all along: that internet trolls are archetypal Machiavellian sadists.... via Heather-Anne MacLean's post: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140730175026-5723090-don-t-feed-the-trolls-research-reveals-psychopathy - Online trolls are psychopaths and sadists, psychologists …

"The original converted 7.6% better than the new variation... The leads from the long form version of the page were better in quality ... in most cases long form copy doesn't just boost your conversions, but it also increases your rankings too." Indepth and (inevitably) long analysis. Huge feedback. - How Content Length Affects Rankings and…

"Readers want short, snappy content, ideally under 140 characters or at most a list, right? Well, actually, wrong.... 7 recent studies: long form content is alive, thriving and driving high levels of content performance." Full article summarises 7 more, so I won't summarise it here - read it yourself: - Improve Your Content Marketing with Long …

Sometimes long form content helps with conversions, and sometimes it hurts, and sometimes, long form content is better for SEO, but other times it’s worse" Read the full article to understand why ... and how, and when. Key point: " the best long form content marketing doesn’t make one feel like they’re being marketed to...." - Why Long Form Cont…

"a new media startup aims to bring the ProPublica approach abroad, creating Germany’s first nonprofit investigative news organization... completely focused on data journalism... The team intends to compile and share large datasets that map people in power to the money behind them, collaborating with local open data organizations as well as other n…

"there is a hierarchy of information consumers are looking for.... consumers seem much less concerned with how they receive it than with whether the content itself is well conceived, well executed, useful and honest." - Survey: What Types of Content Consumers Do Want From Brands | FleishmanHillard

Brown Moses made his name crowdsourcing information in conflict zones, such as analysing weapons in Syria ... from his front room in Leicester, England... using social media, open source tools, and public information to verify details that news organizations can miss. Today, he's launching a site to pool his and others knowledge together in one…

"Could “all you need to know” be the most insidious, reductive, and lame story formula currently conquering our reading life? Everywhere you turn there’s another purported ne plus ultra explainer purporting to tell us “absolutely everything we could possibly need to know” about some current event, some curiosity of history, some deep mystery of li…

"the Orange is the New Black-inspired content series on women inmates in America cracked the top 10 most read articles on the site, with fifty percent of its traffic coming from social media and 60 percent from mobile. ... time spent ... rivaled time spent with the top New York Times editorial. “ - New York Times adman gushes over native advertis…

Apart from 3 good videos to watch, a good example of content curation... "We have all heard (ad nauseam) about the “power of brand storytelling,” and I know that I have read more than one blog that spits off a numeric list of tips that I just “can’t live without” as a content marketer..." - 3 TED Talks That Uncover the Secrets of Storytelling | …

Key "takeaways" (gag), of which the last is hilarious: "- Two-thirds of readers have felt deceived upon realizing that an article or video was sponsored by a brand. - 54 percent of readers don’t trust sponsored content. - 59 percent of readers believe a news site loses credibility if it runs articles sponsored by a brand. - As education level …

"As media companies seek out new ways to make money, is a crisis of trust brewing?"

IAB/Edelman study on in-feed sponsored content: "The potential success of sponsored content is directly linked to how consumers already feel about the brand advertiser and the publisher hosting the content.... [Brands must] Create value for audiences ... publishers should ... be willing to walk away from advertisers who aren’t relevant/trusted" …

"I’ve long said that if you have to put a link next to a label saying “what’s this?” then the label clearly isn’t clear enough. ... when I see a link to Forbes on Twitter, I don’t know whether it is going to take me to (1) the good work of a Forbes journalists, (2) the good work of a Forbes contributor, (3) the bad work of one of many Forbes cont…

"When you’re very interested in a single topic, it’s great to have a place that constantly aggregates news and commentary, adds new information and, in general, speaks to your passion. And because the writers of blogs often are invested in the subject – “they tend to be labors of love,” Mr. Fisher said – their deep interest and knowledge paid off …

"When asked to pay for well-reported news content, there’s a growing swell of readers who understand the value and are willing to invest in it. ... We’re seeing a renewed, if still small, consumer commitment to funding journalism ... these models are developing outside the United States... there is relatively little European foundation support…

" News cooperatives have long thrived in Europe ... and Mexico. Yet, with a few exceptions they never really took root in the U.S. That may be changing. " - Kickstarter Bets On Bringing The Slow Europe Model Of Journalism To The U.S. | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

"blogs are ... just one specific kind of publishing format, with posts that appear in reverse chronological order.... this is a little like saying that a sonnet is just a specific way of ordering text, featuring iambic pentameter and an offset rhyming scheme. Obviously not every blog post is a poem, but there is something inherent in the practice …

"where this style of reporting was once reserved for a newspaper’s resident weird .... [it now] represents a sort of merging between the opinion page and the front page. ... helps keep journalism outlets more accountable for backing up their opinions. No longer can the Wall Street Journal espouse climate denialism from the fact-less safety of the …

As if blogs were just a question of conversational tone and reverse-chronology ... "We’re going to continue to provide bloggy content with a more conversational tone ... We’re just not going to do them as much in standard reverse-chronological blogs.” " - ‘Almost half’ of the NYT’s blogs will close or merge | Poynter.

Fascinating article in Issue 14 (theme: Evolution): "It is a case of convergent evolution—where different species separately developed similar biological adaptations when faced with the same environmental pressures. Salamanders are Wake’s go-to example when asked a decades-old question in evolutionary biology: If you could replay the “tape of lif…

For those still confused: "Content marketing is not PR as such... But there is a basic realization that people are tired of ads and having promotional messages pushed on them. So called “branded journalism” is ... often compelling high-quality content that many newspaper editors would wish their journalists could produce.... brands seem sometimes …

New data supporting old news: "According to Gallup ... of 18,000 consumers surveyed, 62 percent said social media had no influence on their buying decisions. Among millennials, 48 percent said social media didn't make a difference... Many social media advertisers have ... neglected the essence, and potential, of social media: people talking to …

Good example of CMS innovations emerging from newsrooms - wish I'd added to my recent weekly LinkedIn tour: "a multi-faceted piece of newsroom infrastructure, a set of building blocks that will allow organizations to turn on or turn off various engagement features with relative ease ... a bunch of parts that you can assemble and reassemble ... …