Overview: Content Strategy

covering trials can be tricky... trials don’t always unfold in orderly narratives. Instead, they develop in fits and starts, depending on which witnesses are called and which exhibits the prosecution and defense choose to enter.... attorneys don't actually build narrative... The challenge... to create a way to track those arguments as they're made…

summary of Kevin Kelly’s Seminar “The Next 30 Digital Years”, ... part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress...

we frequently receive emails from a whole range of people asking how they can start doing the sort of online open-source investigation and verification that they’ve seen us doing. The skills and methodologies used are all something that can be learnt through a little persistence, but here are a few pieces of advice to get you started. 

the company's newest tweak to its membership program is one that puts listeners in direct conversation with the company's staffers. The idea: Give Gimlet's members access to the company's Slack team

The New York Times is acquiring a marketing agency... Fake Love, an agency that specializes in live experiences, virtual and augmented reality... to grow its revenue in part by offering more ad agency services,.. I’m getting daily requests for [augmented reality]... chatbots. And VR, the market is already hot.

The feature enables Medium users to volunteer to translate Medium stories into the language of their choice. Approved translators see a “Translate” button on Medium stories and clicking that button clones the post and seeds the clone with a Google translate version of the story in the language that they select. They then go in and make the Google …

David and Petros were there to conduct the FT’s first experiment with livestreaming 360-degree video... we failed to produce a watchable live stream... we learnt eight specific lessons for next time:

A couple of months ago I included augmented and virtual reality in Top3ics, my occasional newsletter, adding “Consider these as first notes towards a future post.” I then forgot about it. Thanks, Newt Gingrich!

The public is no longer uninformed. They are misinformed, and that requires an entirely different editorial focus ... just reporting the news doesn't actually solve the public's needs. Now your focus must be on explaining the news instead.... the newspaper is stuck in an existential crisis ... stop being a newspaper and start being something el…

From large national newspapers to small independent websites, outlets are working together to cover news across the continent in many languages.

Vox wants to move beyond the web page to tell compelling stories... That Clinton package was the first public product of the Vox Storytelling Studio... launching on the premise of hypercharging the concept of the story, using all resources available to transform the story into a experiential entity... publications and media companies must continue…

Even for brands associated with hard news…their top or second videos in terms of Facebook engagement numbers turned out to be animal videos... interest in video news does increase significantly when there is a big breaking news story. But the rest of the time? Online video news is less of a force than publishers might hope... 97.5 percent of time…

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

No longer will I read or give attention to hyper partisan news entities or the conservative echo chamber... I remember not long ago when tragic events used to bring us together as a nation. Now because of increasingly powerful and extreme echo chambers on the right and left these events tear us apart...In the clickbait era, media entities, aggrega…

Facebook Live videos will appear on many more News Feeds — regardless of whether users Like, Wow or Haha the content. Posts linking out of Facebook will need a lot more user interaction to get the extra eyeballs.

“I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory,” ... to no avail. He called on his friends in the technology industry to act on this ‘echo-chamber problem’.... Why are they making the demand of social media companies — and not news organisations?...how we see technology now: both as something separate fro…

an organization dedicated to "ever closer union" has never faced a setback as profound as the looming departure from the UK, and it’s natural to wonder if this doesn’t mark the beginning of a larger unraveling.... Rather than a prediction or a hot take, here’s a way to think through the different alternatives.

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

TL;DR: My Osmo is awesome, but I need better audio kit.Don’t watch this if you expect to see award-winning journalism - this is just me doing my thinking in public, and I think I love my Osmo, even if I definitely need more kit to manage the audiovisual better in noisy places (and get a real journalist to ask intelligent questions):

Read the same documents our reporters gathered. Watch the video out-takes of an interview, or take a 360-degree virtual reality adventure. Test your knowledge about complex issues with a quiz. Sound off about issues, interacting through polls and emoticons or by leaving a comment. We’ll give you the tools and access to become involved, either in d…

Allen tucked favorable mentions of prominent “Playbook” sponsors into his editorial offerings... a State Department official essentially ghost-wrote an item for “Playbook.”The skinny: Mike Allen ran a press-release mill for vested interests in Washington... a weekly sponsorship for the newsletter falls somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000... Ev…

It’s opening up its digital advertising shop for its subscribers, offering an inventory of sponsored content alongside its inventory of news stories... the AP has made the logical jump to a full-on mini agency... subscribers will be able to flick a switch and have the sponsored content show up nicely integrated on the page... surveys measuring…

Some 63% of marketers plan to increase their native advertising budgets this year... The Times launched its "T Brand Studio".. in 2014... has created more than 100 campaigns for more than 50 brands.. generated around $35.7 million. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed, which only sells native ads, generated revenue of $100 million in 2014, while Media Week estima…

The Atlantic expects native campaigns to drive 70 percent of its ad revenue this year, up from 60 percent in 2015... the NYTimes’ branded content division, T Brand Studio, now includes 70 staffers and will “deliver more than $50 million in revenue this year,” up from an estimated $35 million in 2014

includes translating political explainers as "part of our attempt to reach new readers who are interested in American politics — but perhaps don't speak English... "We were convinced that there is a need for translated articles, but we hadn't hit on the right formulation in terms of how to get a professionalized translation that's turned around qu…

what the Associated Press has learnt about the process of creating 360-degree video stories

When people ask me how to build an audience, what they really want to know is, how do they get an audience to just come to them. You don’t. No audience just magically appears.... write up an entire profile of who your ideal customers/readers/viewers are ... go find them ... get your content in front of them

media companies, from the Telegraph to Bloomberg, have spent serious money pushing their video products... the path to monetisation is still not clear: the cost of creating content is high, and business models involving adverts are being affected by adblocking and falling rates (cpm's)... if you are going to attempt to make money from video, succ…

well-known for its data-visualizations — half of the 60 daily articles published contain charts — and on May 10, it officially took the wrapper off Atlas, so anyone can sign up and create their own graphs.

The power law that benefits old TV media, however, will make its downfall that much more dramatic. If viewership continues its monotonic decline, even the largest offline TV media networks will quickly find themselves on the elbow of that curve — fighting for the profitability they once took for granted. Once that happens, the decline will be sudd…