Overview: Content Strategy

these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy... We’ve monitored more than 7,000 social media accounts over the last 30 months and at times engaged directly with them. Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s social media and hacking …

the evidence of this orchestrated Russian intelligence effort to hack the outcome of the American election... seems flimsy at best... saying is that Russia took advantage of the social web’s desire to just share things without reading them. It may be true, but so does every other media outlet.

Zuckerberg’s emerging dilemma. He doesn’t want Facebook ... to be an arbiter of what’s legit and what’s not. But if Facebook is now going to prohibit fake news sites from using its ad network to sell ads, it will need a list of its own... Google has long had its own list of legitimate news sources... hasn’t apparently wanted to cut into its own…

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. ... very like being in the Matrix but with less kung fu and more Polly Toynbee and Nigel Farage... here are a few of the things I’ve learned…

a lot of people don’t know fake news when they see it, sensationalized reports are more likely to go viral on social media than sane ones, and distrust of traditional (and genuinely more reliable) media sources is rising. Professor Nicole A. Cooke ... focusing on human information behavior, information literacy, and diversity in librarianship.... …

Confirmation bias is usually described as a tendency to notice or search out information that confirms what one already believes, or would like to believe, and to avoid or discount information that’s contrary to one’s beliefs or preferences. This presidential election was undoubtedly the most contentious of any in the memory of most voters... Th…

There’s bad information out there that’s not necessarily fake. It’s never as clear-cut as you think... Facebook’s algorithm may not understand the various shades of falsehood. Facebook could tweak its algorithm to promote related articles from sites like FactCheck.org so they show up next to questionable stories on the same topic in the news fee…

Preteens and teens ...often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find... 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story... according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students

the groundbreaking work on “post-truth” was performed by academics, with further contributions from... middle-class professionals... Instead of “the truth”, which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new intellectual orthodoxy permitted only “truths” – always plural, frequently personalised, inevitably relativised... all claims on trut…

All the BS that’s fit to click. A Medium Collection

As Facebook attempted to capture the fast-moving energy of the news cycle from Twitter... it built a petri dish for confirmation bias... Here’s how... ‘Share’ Button ... encouraging people to share quickly and without much thought... “original sharing,” where people post their own photos, text updates... was declining..., content from celebritie…

the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end... many good effects... But the fixation on diversity ... produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.

“So all the fact-checking of Trump’s lies, all the investigative journalism about his failures, even the tapes — none of it meant anything.” In short, what happened to news ...? determining what counts as journalism and who counts as a journalist is a perpetual struggle ... No single trend explains the dissolution of news... What we ended up with…

Let’s take a break from the Donald, Facebook and the end of democracy, and try to focus on what’s important.

this is something to be very, very excited about... Verified accounts can now add external links to their stories, allowing users to click through ... Users can also tag other users... consider tying snippets together to make an expansive and interactive content experience. Tell a story in several parts to keep users engaged and build their inte…

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

information bubbles didn’t burst on 8 November, but ... mainstream media and polling systems underestimated the power of alt-right news sources and smaller conservative sites that largely rely on Facebook to reach an audience... fake news is not a uniquely Republican problem... What is ... is the validation given to fake news by the now president-…

Their job is to navigate the world of information, help scholars and students get what they need, and distinguish good information from bad. They’ve faced their own technological disruptions, and have responded by developing a set of principles to help their public assess the credibility of information and use it ethically. They call this framewor…

We talk to a digital journalist from the Euronews about the rise of ‘immersive’ videos like 360° and VR. ... VR (or 360° video) is a very social medium. Some of the earlier comments we received complained the shots were too static, too empty... one of the videos we are the most proud of, and which performed the best... more a feature-style piece, …

42% use editorial teams for native advertising... Yet 38% say the lack of separation of the editorial and commercial sides of the business is a threat

Raising Barriers... took readers to eight countries across three continents and examined the divisions between countries and peoples through interwoven words, video and sound... we used every multimedia tool in our arsenal. Here’s what we learned from the experience

hierarchy of good writing, particularly of good science writing... Explainers make information clear and comprehensible... Elucidators go beyond explanation and into illumination — they transmute information into understanding by ... integrating various bits of knowledge into a larger framework of comprehension... Enchanters do all of the above, b…

will stream Trump’s rallies directly each night and feature pre-and post-event commentary... a way for the campaign to circumvent the mainstream media ... says as much about Trump’s future in media as it does about Facebook’s.

I finally vlogged my first event. Some first impressions.

we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of journalists experimenting with immersive storytelling to tell important stories in new ways... Journalism 360, an initiative to build a network of journalists willing to tackle those challenges and share what they’re learning. With this effort, we’re looking to support experiments, provide training wor…

Decline of text in favour of videos means more Trumps and Berlusconis around the world... the internet which was the last word-centred public space after the decline of print journalism, is capitulating to the television format... public opinion in the age of television is more a set of “emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the …

where curated broadcast channels shine and it’s easier than ever to search for live videos

people comment 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos... we wanted to highlight some of the recent trends and themes we’ve seen emerge... Local reporters often have devoted fans who are interested in viewing their authentic Facebook Live content. Certain news content resonates...

One of the vlogs I did at the EU Week of Regions & Cities with the winners of the #EUinmyRegion blogging competition I ran for the EC. All vlogs can be found in this Moment.