Overview: Media

Part 2 of my second weekly roundup, where the overriding theme is innovation.

@baekdal explores "a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry ... based on a business model that used to work in the old days of media, but was as a result of scarcity." Newspapers, he argues, are "the supermarket of news ... [but] upermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do... But on the internet, e…

Good piece from @digitaltonto pointing out that "data journalism ... falls short when confronted with complexity and nuance... Traditional journalists could benefit from more data literacy and objective analysis, while data journalism would be much improved by real world context. Unfortunately, little integration has occurred. Traditional journa…

"it appears that the FT is adopting a model similar to that of a wire service in its mobile approach, with mobile news being complemented by context, comment, and analysis in the print product, as well as to a certain degree on the web." - “From a news business to a networked business”: The FT pushes its workflows to digital » Nieman Journalism L…

"publishers like the Economist Group are still trying to get their salespeople on board with a way of selling that they're either confused by or outright hostile to - so hostile, in fact, that some buyers have encountered salespeople who have actively tried to talk them out of programmatic sales." - How the Economist Group is retooling for prog…

The NYT's "Snowfall" of native advertising. Great quality. Still don't like native advertising.

... We are statistically closer to the next recession than to the last one, and another year or two of double-digit ad declines will push many papers into 3-day printing schedules, or bankruptcy, or both. " Clay Shirky giving it straight. What will the world be like in 5 years time? - Nostalgia and Newspapers, Clay Shirky

"an interesting glimpse at the technology responsible for publishing 700 articles, 600 images, 14 slideshows, and 50 videos on a daily basis." I find the article fascinating because of what the CMS is not - it: "does not render our website or provide community tools to our readers. Rather, it is a system for managing content and publishing d…

The implications for CMS and responsive design of these "three key points to consider for adaptive storytelling" are potentially huge. - Advice for 'adaptive storytelling' from the Washington Post | Media news

One for @richardmedic ... "Smydra ... he wants to find a way to allow the public to benefit from all the knowledge of future news events locked up inside newsrooms.... He'd love your thoughts" - Can you turn future news events into structured data? » Nieman Journalism Lab

"With the launch of new site after new site in 2014, it's been a fascinating time to watch digital media try to figure itself out. Amid the turmoil of disruption, buffeted by tech companies' control over information distribution, but aware of new fields of possibility, the past few years were filled with defending legacy brands. So this new round…

Apparently we are all now "little more than webs of flesh spun over packages of saleable data", according to a searing indictment of Google's anti-anonymity policy specifically. This is required reading for anyone interested in a balanced view of anonymity, privacy and public discourse: "The Google+ so-called "real name" policy can best be descr…

Particularly like reason 1: "1. Content curation provides a variety of perspectives. Offering diverse points of view enhances your credibility. This is particularly important on social media platforms where participants get annoyed with businesses that just shout me, me, me. " Remind you of anyone you know? - The Top 10 Reasons You Need Content…

New report ”examines the current state of data journalism... calling for more transparency on how data is collected and used in journalism, anticipating an explosion in news apps as a way of producing information, and ways newsrooms can address security around their data and reporting. " In particular, I love this: "...the advice that newsroom le…

"Huffington Post’s U.S. site and mobile apps will shift to using only Facebook comments, CTO Otto Toth announced. “This is far from an an end to conversation; it’s the start of conversation where you want to have it — and where you’ve been having it already,” he wrote. Readers are having a Facebook conversation under Toth’s post, but many of the…

"We’ve been on Livefyre comments for a little under a year now, and while we weren’t the biggest fans of Facebook Comments* while we were using them, we’ve since realized that there is no perfect solution for commenting. And Facebook Comments, as troubled as they can be, are actually not that bad. ... until someone invents a perfect solution... w…

" a buggy Livefyre launch, with lots of you using it and breaking it, is still better than Facebook Comments." - Commenters, We Want You Back | TechCrunch

"Though the political conversation about Europe has gained in importance everywhere in recent years, the truth is that Europeans are not having the same conversation. That is a serious problem for Europe’s leaders: the electoral earthquake is big enough for them to feel compelled to respond to their citizens’ economic and political discontent; but…

Aug(De)Mented Reality- deliriously wonderful!

"The experience of talking about race, ethnicity and culture on the Internet is nearly always deeply disenchanting. People don't even talk past each other; they talk right through each other. Prejudices harden. We find ourselves confirming our worst stereotypes of one another. And that's before the slurs fly." Some great lessons for making it wor…

Over 70% of EU voters did not vote for the EU. Where now?

"We explain the European court of justice ruling saying that Google will have to delete some information from its index – and why it has divided opinion" Good example of explainer journalism, and of how answering the comments often looks like more work than writing the thing in the first place (if you don't believe me, scan the comments): - Expl…

"there are themes that may be more broadly applicable than scanning the headlines might make you believe.... ... report defines audience development as "the work of expanding our loyal and engaged audience," ... While this is a central role for the newsroom, audience development is the responsibility of every individual... ... another important …

"it is the innovation report which needs to be read cover to cover by anyone whose work includes a digital media component. "

More titbits from that internal NYT digital report: "There are about 14.7 million articles in the Times’ archives back to 1851 ... We can be both a daily newsletter and a library — offering news every day, as well as providing context, relevance and timeless works of journalism.” " - The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key d…

"The New York Times lost 80 million homepage visitors—half the traffic to the nytimes.com page—in two years.... this will make the news more about readers ...[because] homepages reflect the values of institutions, and Facebook and Twitter reflect the interest of individual readers [who] aren't interested in hard news, but rather entertainment, se…

"... technical weaknesses in the paper’s backend: The lack of an organized system of tags to organize stories’ metadata ..."

"Has the art of bookmarking has died or got renamed or repurposed as curation? Did bookmarking became blogging. Did bookmarks become shared embeddable content?" - While Content Lay in Shock, Did Bookmarks Die? | UGC list creation, content curation & crowdsourcing.

Deadtree media to do more with legacy content than paper birdcages! The latest high-profile move into explanatory journalism is New York Times' The Upshot: "offer a combination of data journalism and explanatory reporting ... head-to-head with Ezra Klein’s Vox and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight ... a kind of internal aggregator and explainer for…

Great example of modern US longform content from Vox, where they use a specific style to link to one of their 'content cards'. Plus a killer quote on the 'blame Brussels' syndrome: "... banks that owned eurozone government debt were saved, and so were institutions around the world ... Meanwhile, politicians got to take credit for keeping their c…