Overview: Media

As good a definition as you'll find anywhere: "Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way." - The Busy Person's Guide to Content Curation: A 3-Step Process There's more than just a definition - a few good ideas. However, the definiti…

Reflecting Shirky's (pre-Twitter) observations about reciprocity, social media and traditional media, Slate reframes how to view Twitter. Worth a read: "Twitter is not a social network. Not primarily, anyway. It’s better described as a social media platform, with the emphasis on “media platform... Social networks connect people with one another…

"The real question isn't why we don't read anymore, it's why we comment—passionately and with the utmost confidence—after reading only a headline. " - NPR Pulled a Brilliant April Fools' Prank On People Who Don't Read

We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views

Neat visualisation - could be relevant for EEAS. "Political scientists Kyle Dropp, Joshua Kertzer, and Thomas Zeitzoff asked 2,066 Americans to find Ukraine on a map. Then they asked what the US should do in Ukraine. "We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign pol…

And not just journalists. New generation news sites are redefining news and, by consequence, rethinking information architecture, content strategy and CMS. I only hope the results filter through to everyone else, and sooner rather than later. "... a moment when young talent began demanding superior technology as the key to producing superior jour…

A new generation of companies, like CIRCA, are redefining the structure of how information is treated, and building new CMS to support it. Their approach will inevitably feed into a new generation of CMS for whom the 'article' and 'page' are, if not meaningless, at least optional. And I for one can't wait. "what we’re really doing at Circa is a…

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

"data-driven journalism doesn’t simply strive to contribute to public policy and culture debates, it aims to end them with a decisive answer. ... In Actually Journalism, news and opinion aren’t needed; to understand something, all the audience needs is this fact, this piece of data, this answer... [but] if Actually Journalism can’t find a way to e…

Great perspective from Ben Thompson on how today's internet flips the bell curve into a power curve, and what that means for anyone producing content which is not best-of-breed: "The implication of news consumption being dominated by the tall skinny part of the power curve is that those who can regularly appear there – the best of the best – are …

Perils and pitfalls of augmented reality …

"He says that his goal is to capture the readers attention like these [clickbait] articles, but then get them to interact, think about, share, and meaningfully engage with the content. " - 2014: The future of content marketing - an interview with Brian Solis - Technorati Business

A tour of upcoming innovations in "Explanatory journalism... will play a larger role in the digital media landscape ..." illustrate a wider trend: “... content-centric start-ups getting funded. ... web and mobile publishing platforms still present new opportunities for new entrance, new publishers, new journalists, new publications...” - 'FiveTh…

Surprised that after a week this only has about 500 views. Vox.com should be one of the top tech-first news innovators to watch this year

Surprise surprise... "Circa is developing two types of ads: magazine-style full-screen banners, like Flipboard, and sponsored posts... which look and feel like editorial, created by a separate staff.... One future revenue possibility would be licensing access to Circa's article data to other publishers," - News App Circa Looks to Native Ads for Fi…

Excellent overview of a complex topic. Makes me think that a lot of EU communications could benefit hugely from reframing itself as "non-profit news", and considering these questions in depth. Alas, the only interesting debate in this field seems to be limited to the US. "The value of online and offline audience engagement is a question that bot…

Looks like one kind of newspaper has a long future - the worst kind: "Supermarket tabloids have long been an icon of unreliability, largely because of their outrageous claims and sensational, melodramatic design. But when individual pieces are shared via social media, these visual and context clues are typically stripped out... Without this conte…

Is data journalism just another opportunity to bamboozle an audience? Surely publishing the data in interrogable form would be the answer? "data give commentary a false sense of authority since data analysis is inherently prone to bias. The author’s priors, what he believes or wants to be true before looking at the data, often taint results that …

A pretty good idea of where news & journalism will be in 5 years, or deja vu all over again? "the organizations worth backing must be run by tech savvy, top-notch people focused on social distribution of stories that serve an existing but underserved niche audience. ... “They are all technology companies first ... understand how people utilize t…

"“In the old days, the few big newspapers were so profitable they could run desks on most of the most important issues in the world. Now, as the news landscape fragments, investigative journalism often takes place in nonprofits... " - Upworthy partners with ProPublica and advocacy media groups on original content » Nieman Journalism Lab

@Poynter's piece seems fair. While it's true that "rebundling of news is booming. New aggregation sites with a social media twist, led by BuzzFeed, are working ingenious variations on the first wave like The Huffington Post..." ... and that if everyone in the world had a smart phone and an iPad, the global news market will grow rather than shri…

Well, plus ca change - absolutely none of the things some BloggingPortal editors said we'd do after our meeting in January have been done, apart from our own posts and what Stefan did, which is ironic given that he told us he had no time to do anything.

"a new model for digital-first audio programming ... a collective, helping to market one another, providing guidance on technical issues, and sharing lessons on growing audiences. Radiotopia will provide the framework for raising money..." - Welcome to Radiotopia, a podcast network with the aesthetics of story-driven public radio » Nieman Journal…

"some of the BBC’s most experienced investigative reporters explain how they find and tell their stories." Access to the BBC Academy's College of Journalism website is free to everyone in the UK and commercially available overseas

Interesting perspective on the rash of new tech-content hybrids emerging in the media space. Back in the day, companies could be either tech or content, but not both: "What were you going to be really good at? Engineering or “content”? You couldn’t do both, because that would mean that one would be subordinate to the other. And if you were going…

"We don’t write articles. We tell stories and those stories persist over time... Each story is comprised of fragments ... stitched together to create a story. In many ways circa represents the next step in the atomization of news ... allows people to read stories and identify new developments faster ... and makes it possible to dig deeper by lin…

"The way we evolved ... is really not the way we have to operate today ... this attempt at hyperproductivity is making us much less productive.'" A podcast worth every minute. I have a few of these techniques down pat, most days, as long as I can work from home, but the whole mindfulness thing is still over my horizon. - 4 Ways to Make Your …

worth repeating for everyone who thinks that the path to democracy in the EU is measured in column inches...

This post started out as a comment to Blogging, content discovery and the European public sphere, Kosmopolito's post marking Bloggingportal's 5th birthday (all posts and more). However Kosmo, one of the old guard of EU bloggers (and currently jobhunting, btw) raised more than a couple of good questions, so my comment needed a larger home…

"“Fished out of the shadows, old news coverage in China’s media can provide clues to the family connections of government officials as reporters investigate their financial dealings.”"