Overview: Content Strategy

This updates both my earlier Taming the Firehose and Where is social media taking you in 2016? posts, and better aligns my productivity process with my personal content strategy.

With its reliance on polling data over source cultivation and number crunching over narrative, FiveThirtyEight... is at the forefront of a shift in the way political journalism is practiced.... being an outsider, maybe you’re able to call B.S. a little easier. That’s a helpful role to have.... the site attracted nearly 10 million unique visitors …

“So far, the growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand,”

all of us, even highly intelligent people, are prone to irrationality. Across a wide range of scenarios, the experiments revealed, people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason... those with a high I.Q. were, if anything, more prone to the conjunction fallacy... rationality, unlike intelligence, can be improved through traini…

using Facebook to repackage some of its magazine stories into video form... takes advantage of a Facebook tool that lets publishers merge a series of photos into videos... kept things simple... roughly 30 seconds and rarely going beyond a few words, a chart, or a photo in each individual slide... take as little as two minutes

isn’t squeamish about mixing marketing and editorial.... For instance, a commercial journalist sits within the editorial team and creates content for the ESI Media brands across a vertical like TV and entertainment, will help pitch ideas for a relevant TV client

Most events are not designed for VR... The rule of thumb is ‘would you look around you in a certain situation?’ if the answer is yes, then ...maybe there is an opportunity to create a VR experience short storytelling is better for breaking news... stick to longer time frames for feature stories

a great summary of the difference between Snap’s Spectacles and Glass too — the former is a pair of sunglasses that records video, while the latter was technology strapped to your face.

Circa 360, will produce two weekly ad-supported VR pieces... brands can run VR-shot pre-roll ads... take our consumers to places that journalists get to go but the public very seldom gets to ... immersive advertising ... augmented reality ad spots... short videos that hand off to each other—they have a purpose or a pathway to see other stuff b…

two products, Springboard and Time Inc. Connect to help editors source content from contributors, some for traditional editorial content and some for native or branded content... a way for editors to create more content around specific topics or events rather than just getting content on the cheap... gathering ... people with some degree of social…

NBC News has found that people are willing to click through to its site when there’s breaking news, so it’s posting less of those articles on Instant Articles while posting more feature-type content... The New York Times ... tended to be long-form think pieces or analysis, not breaking news

Far from disappearing, human curation and sensibilities have a new value in the age of algorithms... Facebook is mired in a series of controversies about the curation of its news feed... recently tried to smooth the process out by firing its human editors … only to find the news feed degenerated into a mass of fake and controversial news stories.…

Each issue is conceived around a single topic ... with a new cluster of pieces, grouped together as chapters, published each Thursday.... To supplement ... Facts So Romantic, a blog updated closer to daily Another against-the-grain move: Its print magazine collects the best of the magazine’s web content... printed on high-quality paper and desi…

they’re not the game-changer he thought they’d be... We have to stop trying to find a single problem. It needs to be solved in a million different ways, every single day.

over 30 news organizations ... and tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to share best practices on how to verify true news stories and stop the spread of fake ones.

Following the controversial firing of the editorial team who managed the Trending Topics... technology that will help prevent fake news stories from showing up in the Trending section.

NPR... team of more than 20 reporters offering real-time assessments on a live transcript of the debate.... used a transcription service that provides closed captioning via its API and fed the transcript into a single Google Doc where staffers cleaned up the transcription as it came in... more than 50 people had access

the reality-based community... people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality... That’s not the way the world really works anymore... We’re an empire... we create our own reality. ... Trump is building on the foundation laid by Karl Rove and other great American fabulists, but he’s doing something funda…

when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

One small tag for Facebook, one giant disaster for your favorite publishers... For publishers sharing native ads ... have to tag the brand in the post... that brand’s marketing team gets access to the post’s insights... allow savvy marketers to calculate just how big a margin publishers are taking on these campaigns — and potentially walk away fe…

Since Facebook made its livestreaming feature widely available earlier this year, publishers have been experimenting with on-the-spot video in a variety of ways... we are starting a series of in-depth articles chronicling their experiments IBTimes UK has been working on three different live video formats: Q&As with columnists and reporters, panel…

BBC Business Unit has been experimenting with 'news you can use', a concept which mimics tutorials and informational videos popular with YouTube viewers, in a bid to engage a wider audience on social media... Using just his mobile phone, Shaw is able to shoot videos quickly and easily, wherever he can grab the interviewees.

media outlets are using different strategies when it comes to Instagram Stories versus Snapchat... I talked with The New York Times, National Geographic, and Sports Illustrated ... to understand how they are trying to make use of Instagram Stories for a new kind of visual narrative.

All hail the Trump-o-Meter, a short post on Medium

repeating a lie, which is generally part of the debunking process, can reinforce it. ... confirmation bias leads people who want to believe something to believe it even more after they’ve been shown they’re wrong.

Had a great time setting up and running a blogging competition for the EU Commission’s Regional Policy department. It’s not over yet, though: the three winners announced today are coming to Brussels this October as fully accredited journalists to European Week of Regions and Cities. 

MediaRadar said the average renewal rate for sponsor content this year is 21 percent.... Polar recently described renewal rates as “weak,”... We give the advertisers what our standards and ethics forever forbade — confusing our readers about the source of content — and then the advertisers wake up and say, ‘Well, that was fun. But we’re bored with…

quality filter setting ... can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior... filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follo…

Deepstream makes it easy to remix one or more livestreams by adding context and background... by introducing a new role into the livestreaming ecosystem: the curator... easily embed live video into a player that includes context cards... set up with just a few clicks to feature news stories, polls, maps, tweets, free text and more to help you expl…

image... apparently shows the spread of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident... being shared widely ... despite the fact that it... shows the wave height of the tsunami... you might want to doublecheck before hitting Share... here’s how